For anyone in retail it won’t have escaped your notice that today is ‘Black Friday’ – aka the Friday after the US Thanksgiving holiday. It signifies the start of the Christmas shopping silly season with a range of special discounts and dramatic promotions. Record figures are expected and people have been camping outside stores all night – as has become traditional in recent years.
Big UK retailer announcements this week prove there is certainly enough incentive for retailers over this side of the Atlantic to use this holiday to offer consumers promotional discounts. According to BRC figures released this week, in-store footfall dropped by 2.3% between Aug and Oct this year, and by 4.7% just in October. Obviously this has had an impact on profits, with even Arcadia announcing the closure of 250 stores along with 38% slide in pre-tax profits.
So the question is, how do we get the UK shopping again? Last weekend, we read an amazing article in the Sunday Times about the latest craze to sweep across the US. ‘Extreme Couponing’ involves ‘the extensive and focused use of coupons offering reductions or bulk purchase discounts’. And UK citizens are now flying over to the US to take classes on how to do this properly.
A key finding of the article was that over here we are a little too embarrassed to present old school paper coupons in stores. And what seems obvious to us is that mobile coupons can mitigate this typical UK attitude – and dare we say it – make coupons cool!
From a consumer point of view mobile coupons are convenient and easy to request. For retailers, they drive footfall, are fully measureable and cheaper to manage than their printed counterpart. So it’s no big surprise that Juniper have forecast that the mobile couponing market is set to grow from $5.4bn this year to $43.2bn (800% increase) by 2016.
