Coupons make slow but steady progress
Rating: scale needed, quickly
By Annie Turner
Being given coupons when you’re out and about – for discount coffee, cheaper cinema tickets, cut-price pizza – is an appealing idea. So far though, the number of offers are very limited.
Mobile coupon company Cellfire has released figures concerning the redemption of its coupon campaigns for six months up to the end of June. Shoppers between the ages of 18 and 34 accounted for 68% of redemptions, with those between 35 and 44 only redeeming 18%. Coupons for food and entertainment are the most common.
What are the inhibitors? To prevent fraud, there needs to be an infrastructure in place for both the web and mobile. To get companies to pay for coupons, they have to be convinced there is a market for them and that customers are aware of them, which is a bit of a circular argument because at the moment, the market is very small. Still larger companies and chains are starting to experiment, which brings us to another key element – making it as easy as possible for companies to participate.
There have been suggestions that coupons might be squeezed out of the mobile market altogether by SMS-based marketing. Hmmm. There has already been a backlash against unsolicited text messages and regulators are probably going to get a lot tougher as they proliferate whereas coupons can be offered as part of a search, for pizza, say, on mobile or the web. We think coupons have a big future. We’re less optimistic about SMS-based marketing.
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