Walk in a Mall, Receive a Mobile Coupon
Smart online shoppers always search the Web for a coupon before they make a purchase. RetailMeNot, one of the leading coupon Web sites, is also trying to offer coupons for mall shoppers via their cellphones. — The idea is the same as the paper coupons …
Context & Ripple Effects
RetailMeNot built its business on a pull model: shoppers searching the web for a code before checkout. This move flips that to push — offers delivered to cellphones while the shopper is already walking the mall, placing the coupon at the moment of decision rather than before it.
The company is entering a lane others have been marking out for years. Coupons.com spent 2011 readying its platform for NFC-based redemption, Foursquare moved into coupons in May 2012, and Nielsen found in March that retailer mobile websites beat apps among US smartphone owners — evidence the delivery surface is the mobile web, not dedicated apps. The idea also has a longer lineage: back in 2007 the Times covered malls guiding shoppers by text message.
First-order effects
- Mall retailers gain a channel that reaches shoppers already on-site, converting foot traffic that would otherwise browse-and-leave into tracked redemptions.
- RetailMeNot extends its audience relationship beyond the pre-purchase web search, competing for attention inside the store rather than just before it.
Second-order effects
- Coupons.com, which has been preparing for NFC redemption since 2011, and Foursquare, which joined the coupon race earlier in 2012, face pressure to match location-triggered delivery or cede the in-mall moment.
- Merchants and mall operators gain redemption data tied to physical presence, sharpening the questions the Times raised in 2010 about how much online coupons know about the shoppers who use them.
Third-order effects
- If location-triggered offers become standard, coupon distribution consolidates around whoever controls the mobile access surface at the point of sale — a shift from printed inserts and searched codes toward platforms that can pair a shopper's location with an offer in real time.
- That same pairing makes physical retail measurable in the way e-commerce already is, giving chains data to justify or abandon store-level promotions based on walked-in versus redeemed traffic.
The trend: Couponing is shifting from pull to push — from shoppers hunting codes online to offers arriving on the phone at the store door, with mobile carriers of the offer becoming the gatekeepers.