Couponing

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Couponing is a communication tool of advertising within a marketing plan , which includes the basic ideas of the 1950s and 1960s commonly used years coupons uses. The publisher grants a selected group of people an advantage in the form of a discount , an addition or the like on presentation of a coupon .

history

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Banned in Germany by the discount law since 1934, couponing had been in use as a marketing tool in the USA since the end of the 19th century . In the mid-1960s, coupons were used by every second American family, and this continued to grow until 1975 when it hit the 35 billion coupon mark. With the growing spread of the Internet, digital coupons were developed for downloading or emailing in addition to the paper-based coupon. As a result, the percentage of coupon users has grown to 83% of all US citizens since 1975.

After the abolition of the discount law in 2001, which prevented price reductions of more than 3%, and the repeal of the 1935 bonus ordinance , which forbade free gifts in business transactions, couponing has also been made possible in Germany since August 1, 2001. Couponing has not yet achieved the same importance in Germany as it does in the USA. A sharp increase in the number of redeemed coupons is expected in the future, the number of which exceeded 10 billion for the first time in 2009. In the US, as many as 240 billion vouchers were issued by 2,000 companies in the same year. Analogous to the development in the USA, portals such as Groupon and DailyDeal have also established themselves in Germany , which offer vouchers online and via apps on behalf of local and national companies .

practice

As a rule, the value of the voucher is reimbursed to the retailer by the manufacturer plus a flat fee. The billing between different dealers and manufacturers, the so-called coupon clearing, is often done by a third, independent instance, the so-called clearing house , since direct billing between many dealers and manufacturers would be very time-consuming and rarely objective.

The retailer / service provider can also issue coupons themselves, the value of which is ideally refinanced through an advertising subsidy from the manufacturer. First and foremost, however, couponing is a strategy that gives manufacturers themselves the opportunity to actively sell their products. Cross-selling can thus be stimulated, for example by printing coupons for toothpaste on toothbrush packaging.

A couponing campaign goes through five phases: conception, production, distribution, redemption and clearing.

Coupon types

Discount coupon
A discount is granted.
Bundling coupon : Free addition of a product or service to purchase (“Buy one, get one free”).
Info coupon
Voucher for receiving information.
Loyalty coupon
Reward for a customer relationship or a purchase in the form of a virtual currency or cash.
Online couponing
Voucher code to redeem when ordering in the online shop.
  • Mobile couponing : Retrieving coupons via smartphone . There are different approaches to mobile couponing: Via SMS / MMS (push method) or by means of location-based services (pull method), in which the user usually uses an app to display, select and redeem the coupon on the smartphone enables. The context of the user (location, time, age, gender, etc.) is taken into account when selecting the displayed coupons.
Check-out couponing
Individual issue of coupons at the cash register system.

Voucher book

A coupon booklet is a print medium in the form of a small book, booklet or folded sheet, which collects several similarly designed coupon ads. These coupon advertisements can be cut out or torn out using the integrated perforation lines.

Coupon booklets are used by companies from a wide range of industries as a temporary marketing tool to increase sales. In return for the submission or presentation of a separate coupon advertisement, the consumer is granted the promoted benefits of the respective provider. Coupon booklets are distributed free of charge to households or are available to take away from public places. They do not contain any editorial content.

There are also a large number of commercial providers of voucher books or booklets. These books, which are mostly editorially prepared, are published both subject-related (e.g. for golfers) and regionally and sold to the end consumer. These voucher books or blocks differ from the coupon booklets in that they are of a higher quality design and the fact that not just one provider, but many different restaurants, thermal baths or other companies offer vouchers. The term of a voucher book is usually more than a year from the date of publication.

Situation in Germany

This section presents the situation in Germany . Help us to describe the situation in other countries.

Couponing was only possible again in principle after the abolition of the discount law and the bonus ordinance on August 1, 2001 in Germany. From now on, a large number of laws and regulations regulate couponing in Germany:

In addition to these laws and ordinances, there are a number of other regulations, including the ban on discounts for newspapers, books and tobacco products, and advertising restrictions for pharmaceuticals.

literature

  • Jörg Becker, Oliver Vering, Axel Winkelmann: Coupon-Clearing: Differentiation of Clearing-Variants, Trade Study No. 2 . Münster 2003, uni-muenster.de (PDF)
  • Jörg Becker, Oliver Vering, Axel Winkelmann: Couponing & Coupon-Clearing in Germany. Basics and concepts. Trade Study No. 1 . Münster 2003, uni-muenster.de (PDF)
  • Jörg Becker, Oliver Vering, Axel Winkelmann: Clearing: Potential for automation in coupon clearing . Münster 2003, uni-muenster.de (PDF)
  • Wolfgang Hartmann, Ralf Kreutzer, Holger Kuhfuß (Eds.): Manual Couponing . Gabler, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-409-12350-4 .
  • Mirca Mende: Business-to-Consumer Couponing in fair trading law . Dr. Kovac, 2009, ISBN 3-8300-4580-8 .
  • Dirk Ploss, Andreas Berger: Intelligent Couponing. Planning, implementation, success control . Gallileo, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-89842-305-0 .
  • Jörg Pohlmann: Coupon Marketing . Redline, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-478-37560-6 .
  • Ralf Wierich: Personalization and individualization of coupons. An empirical study of the customer loyalty effect of individualized and personalized coupons . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 3-17-020347-9 .
  • Axel Winkelmann: Integrated Couponing. A Process-Based Framework for In-Store Coupon Promotion Handling in Retail . Logos, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-8325-1347-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ History of Couponing ( Memento from August 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Couponing & Coupon Clearing in Germany ( Memento from August 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive )