Le couponing géolocalisé aux US

Mobile coupon free-for-all

Jan 19, 2011

Location-based coupons offer genuine value, they are easy to produce, they have proved to be just as easy to monetise, and consumers love them because they are literally free for all. For these very same reasons, this segment of the market for location-based services (LBS) could become the arena for a free-for-all brawl among the coupon providers, reports Christopher Backeberg...

  The standard question about mobile advertising in general has been raised again during the last week. It's a pointed question: "When will the Year of Mobile Marketing actually arrive?" Few, however, question the effectiveness of mobile coupons and their growth potential. Coupons have caught the imagination of mobile phone users worldwide.
Big companies like Starbucks have declared themselves satisfied with their LBS coupon campaigns. Now more and more smaller enterprises are adding mobile coupons to their ad inventories.
Ben Yoskovitz comments for nextmontréal: "The competition is only going to increase as daily deal sites take over the mind share of small businesses. Although daily deal sites (to date) are not really geo-targeted beyond defining a city of interest, the hype surrounding them is unparalleled."
The current state of play
For a quick picture of where mobile couponing is right now, consider this:

• According to the Washington Post, some estimates have placed the revenues of the two biggest mobile companies for 2010 at $500 million for Groupon and $200 million for LivingSocial
• The Washington Post cites a Groupon estimate that 500 imitators have started up in the wake of Groupon's rapid growth
• The imitators are not all small fry. In November last year, Facebook launched its Facebook Deals service, inspired by the success of Groupon
• Other companies are waking up to the big money flowing through coupon services. As we report this week, Poynt has won a patent, with "priority before the year 2000," for delivering location-based offers and coupons to mobile smartphones based on GPS location and user profile
• To temper the excitement about LBS coupons, BizReport this week quoted a finding by Evolution Insights that grocery shoppers would prefer to receive supermarket offers on their mobiles before they go shopping, not when they're standing in the aisles
• Mobile coupons are generally simple in design and easy to work into LBS apps. They don't consume high bandwidth or require cutting-edge technology from the mobile networks. While 4G and LTE or WiMAX may be essential for many future location-aware services, good-looking coupons work perfectly well with the current 3G technology.

It's too early to know if Poynt will try to leverage its patent on LBS coupon delivery. Many companies routinely patent technologies with no overt intention of following up by litigating for patent infringement. We'll have to wait and see if Poynt sues anyone.
However, we won't have to wait long to see if the LBS coupon deluge will increase. To quote the Washington Post again: "Expect a daily-deal invasion."
Enlarging on this prediction, the Washington Post suggests that Groupon and LivingSocial didn't just happen on a great idea: "They stumbled on a valuable, scalable, transportable idea, one that just might become a new advertising staple."
Size matters in venture funding
We may be about to witness a frantic scramble among the hundreds of smaller coupon companies as they buy out competitors, merge, get taken over or become corpses in the fight for coupon business. The coupon segment has made itself look so attractive that it is already drawing in more start-ups than it can logically sustain in certain areas. The fight for venture funding could be intense.
That's not the situation for the main players. Groupon and LivingSocial appear to have experienced no major problems in raising capital.
Early last week Groupon completed a $950 million round of financing. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Groupon intended to use the funds to expand its daily coupon website and buy back shares from existing shareholders. The investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as well as a private-equity investor, Silver Lake.
The latest valuation of Groupon is believed to be approximately $4.75 billion. Last month the company was so confident of its potential that it declined a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google.
LivingSocial has also been drawing in the investors. Last month it received $183 million in an investment round led by Amazon.com.
The funding for the market leaders strengthens their position to gain from the fundamental principle that businesses make more money by inducing more customers to buy from them. According to the Washington Post, the more successful players are moving towards regional, national and even international expansion. Groupon, for example, is expanding in Israel, India and South Africa.
"The group-coupon boom extends further still, with piggybacking businesses showing up in the last year or so as well," Annie Lowrey wrote in the Washington Post report. "There are sites to aggregate the daily deals: YipIt, 8Coupons, and DealRadar, for instance. And then there are sites - Adility, Wantsa and Ponkle - to help businesses set up their own group coupons."
Meanwhile, the mobile coupon sector's final revenues for 2010 are expected to exceed $750 million. Revenues are likely to top $1 billion this year.
Knowing the where and when
By definition, a location-based coupon is one delivered to the consumer at or near the location that's offering the coupon. This makes the finding by Evolution Insights - that only 8% of consumers want to receive LBS coupons when they're already inside the store - rather surprising.
James Johnson, lead analyst at Evolution Insights, offered an explanation: "This most probably has much to do with the planning that goes into most people's grocery shopping trips. Receiving digital coupons prior to a trip allows for the re-shuffling of shopping lists and menus to incorporate discounted items. By the time a consumer is standing in the aisles it seems a coupon may be too late to be of interest."
By and large, however, mobile coupons are often too good to resist. They typically offer discounts ranging from 50% to as much as 90%. No doubt the nature of coupon delivery will evolve as the providers learn more about exactly where and when their special offers will make the biggest psychological impact on buying decisions.
Such considerations are the fine-tuning. More importantly, analysts are predicting massive growth in deal-based, location-based and social-network-based ads, and through multiple channels. The Washington Post concludes: "Maybe it's better to think of group coupons not as a product distributed by a few companies, but as a method of advertising."

• Profit strategies to monetise location-based services and data come under the spotlight at The Location Business Summit 2011 in Amsterdam on May 24-25

Source : http://social.thewherebusiness.com/content/mobile-coupon-free-all