Coupon Fatigue?

By Glen Gardner, Branding and Marketing Consultant

The challenging economy has helped give birth to numerous coupon opportunities as many shoppers have been trained to always look for a “deal” before they buy. From Groupon to Living Social, people view these outlets as the latest “new” marketing tool. In reality, there’s nothing new about it at all.

The mode of delivery might be different, but it’s just a coupon and those have been around for a long time. I’ve talked with countless businesses that have been sucked into the fray and have regretted it greatly.

If you think carefully about how coupons work, over time it’s an unsustainable business model for most companies. You can’t deeply discount your product to the point where you are making next to nothing (or losing money) and hope to make it up on volume. Some businesses hope they can take a loss to attract a new, loyal customer. The only problem with that train of thought is most coupon shoppers are loyal to the lowest price, not any particular business. In many others cases you are discounting a product or service that a loyal customer may have paid full price for.

It is one of the narcotics of advertising. Once you do it you have to do more of it and at a deeper discount to keep traffic moving through the door. And much like any narcotic, it will clean you out over time.

There are times when coupons do make sense. If you need a quick traffic fix and your margins are great enough to offer a substantial short-term discount, than it can work by bringing a shot of increased traffic. For most businesses the math just doesn’t work over time.

Because the market has been so flooded with coupon offers it’s even harder to cut through with an offer of even 50% off. Coupon fatigue is a real problem with the proliferation of the practice through the economically challenged period.

Whether it’s cutting it out of a newspaper or delivered in an email, it’s still a coupon. For many businesses a more practical approach is developing a consistent “value” proposition. When you factor in the cost of the coupon and the mode of delivery a branding message that adds value to your product is cheaper and a much more sustainable business model.

One More Accolade for the Corridor

Keep on rockin'!  Cedar Rapids ranks 7th!  Click the title above to go to Kiplinger's article about the coolness of CR.

A Goal Without a Plan Is Only a Resolution

By Chris Law
Every year around the time the calendar changes millions of people make New Year’s Resolutions.  Personally I don’t make resolutions.   I prefer to make “goals”.  Resolutions seem so… spineless.  What happens if you don’t follow through on your resolutions?  Nothing really, we just wait until next January and make them again, hopefully with a bit more resolve this time.  My father has made the same New Year’s Resolution for at least the last 13 years.  Every year he resolves to finally clean the attic of all the boxes of kids' crap that accumulated while their four children grew up, and every year those boxes gather a bit more dust.

Goals are different.  With a goal you have only two options: success or failure.  There is really no other way to look at it.  This won’t come as much of a surprise, but I like success much more than failure, and therefore I’m forced to invest more into meeting a goal than I ever would a resolution.

My goal next year is to make more money.  That sounds simple enough, and it’s a very good goal, one that anyone in business for themselves should share.  Now that I have a goal the next step is to make a plan.  The late French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said “A goal without a plan is simply a wish”, or to fit with our theme, a resolution.  To help you with that planning part here is an article from USA Today with 12 ideas geared toward helping you make more money in 2012 than you did in 2011.