Who's Using Coupons? The Affluent.

Nielsen research has just released data that may surprise some, but not those of us that work within the Coupon industry:

Of the 1.6 billion coupons were redeemed in the first half of 2009 (an increase of 23% YOY), more affluent consumers ($70k+) are considered the super heavy coupon users.

As one would expect, larger households with a female head of household 54 years old and younger are serious coupon users.

Consumers living in affluent suburban areas (defined as including annual income of over $94k living in a suburban ring of metropolitan areas) are also serious coupon users. Nielsen's defined "middle class metropolitan fringes and secondary cities with single family homes & a mix of while & blue collar jobs" also falls into the serious coupon user category.

As we would expect, the recession has driven lighter coupon users in 2008 to become heavier users in 2009.

While this data is from Nielsen's Homescan Panel and typically focuses on consumer packaged good purchases, I would argue that this trend crosses to all coupons, including those for non-grocery purchases and online purchases.

Todd Hale, Nielsen's Senior Vice President for Consumer & Shopper Insights, commented on the data, "while some might think that the fervent coupon clippers are only interested in a good deal, our research shows that this was the only group to show an INCREASE in overall purchases, with or without a coupon, suggesting real benefits to companies deploying coupons in their marketing mix".

"Coupons are back in vogue"

Time Magazine's "Cheapskate Blog" covers this data summarizing it by saying that people who make "decent money" are big time coupon users.

This data confirms what I've observed in the 12 years I've been involved in the coupon industry. What's surprising to me is the number of businesses that either don't understand the power of coupons and how to deploy a strategy around them to significantly grow their sales, or feel that offering a "coupon" has a negative impact to their image.

Want to read more about coupons? Here are all the articles & blog posts that I've found of interest this year.

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What was the most popular coupon search this summer? The answer may surprise you.

Google upgraded it’s Search trends tool, Google Insights for Search (beta) this week. You can read all about it here.

As a coupon marketer I played around with the search terms “Coupons”, “Printable Coupons” and “Online Coupons” and some interesting and not so interesting data.

First the not so:

The search trend for "coupons" are up. We know that. It's been well documented.

Here’s what I did find of interest:

Searching for “coupons” surges on Saturdays. Consistently. Except for holiday weekends (such as the 4th of July).



Why Saturday? Because people have more time to search for what is arguably a primarily personal consumer oriented term? Is it because of the specific type of coupon they’re looking for? Some might suggest it's in preparation for grocery shopping over the weekend. Sunday is traditionally when Grocery coupons arrive in the Sunday newspaper as Free Standing Inserts.

But, after top terms “Printable Coupons”, “Free Coupons” and “Online Coupons”, Google Insights shows the specific sector of top searches to be: “Car Rental Coupons” followed by “Restaurant Coupons”, “Pizza Hut Coupons” and then “Food Coupons”.

So why are “Car Rental” coupons been the most popular coupon search?

Ah, the data I was looking at is for the past 90 days. Summertime! Vacations. Fly-in and rent a car.

Car rental coupons popularity as a search term has increased in parallel with coupon searches in general over the past 20 months (January 2008-August 2009) but you can obvious see the impact of vacation season, as in the summer of 2008, searches dropped off by 33% the 2nd week of August and we’ve seen a similar trend this year as we passed the 2nd week of August and presumably summer vacation season has ended and school is about to start up again.



There are many more insights (no pun) in just my industry of interest that seasonality and geography play into the data. I’ll explore this in future posts.

For the time being I think it’s significant to focus on the reasons behind the weekend surge of activity (in general - not just car rental coupon searches) and what this means for traditional coupon & promotional marketing.

For what the numbers in the charts mean, click here. This is US-only data.

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