brandcentric blog

Inmar recently published a press release highighting that 2009 saw year-over-year sequential growth in coupon redemption for the first time in 13 years.  This activity translates into 27% annual growth from 2008 with nearly 3.3 Billion coupons redeemed.  Pretty impressive statistics, but not at all suprising given the anemic global economy and cash-strapped consumers.

But the real news here is the contribution that digital coupons continue to deliver to this equation.  The numbers tell the story all too well:  Print coupon distribution via FSI accounted for 89% of total coupons in circulation and about half of redemptions…which leaves the balance to digital,  mobile and point-of-sale coupon delivery.  So roughly 10% of total coupon distribution (via digital and other means) drove roughly half of all redemptions. 

On a related note, just today Cellfire and Verizon announced a pretty cool distribution partnership.  It’s essentially a white label version of the Cellfire store, and will put digital coupons in front of a large swath of Verizon mobile users.

Given this very apparent shift to digital, it’s amazing that Valassis and other print media publishers are still able to command the insertion rates they do.  I wonder how long it will be before they dump their print FSI service and go all-in to digital delivery only.  Time will tell.

I will be presenting with Jon Van Duyne from Booz & Co. on a webcast next Thursday, October 8 at 11 AM Pacific.  The sesssion is titled Innovation through Predictive Analytics: Preparing Your Organization for Market Success and will be facilitated by Consumer Goods Technology.

You can register here for the event.  Hope you can join us!

It seems every major CPG manufacturer has jumped on the green bandwagon with environmentally friendly packaging, business practices and even new brand platforms.  But does this flight to greener pastures actually return an investment?  Is the brand reaching the right consumer and shopper demographic?  Experian’s GreenAware servicehelps marketers answers these questions and more.  Experian has developed a consumer segmentation around four tiers of “greeness”, allowing marketers to uncover opportunity areas and directly reach the greenest consumers.

It’s exciting to see very targeted one-to-one marketing make a big push in to CPG-land, but my experience to date is that not all CPG marketing organizations are very well set up to take action.  Some very large manufacturers don’t have a central team that “owns” the database.  Consequently, marketing programs deliver excellent, fresh consumer data that often goes stale.  Conversely, some smaller, more nimble CPG marketing organizations I have worked with have the right people, tools and processes in place to scale relationship marketing programs.  Scary, but true.