Consumers’ expected quality of high discount daily deal services

Below is a guest post by Sanne Meussen, who studied consumer responses to daily deal websites in her master's thesis (which I supervised). Apart from the to-be-expected preference for higher discounts on such websites, she also found some evidence that there is a hidden danger to these high discounts...

Even though Groupon has lost $10 billion of its market value in less than one year, the number of subscribers is still growing. Apparently, consumers are still interested in high discount deals on daily deal websites. Why wouldn’t they, if they can eat a first-class meal at a local restaurant with a 75% discount? Groupon even points out: ‘we want each Groupon purchase to feel too good to be true’.

Old school marketing revival on the way: Package and product quality

After the advertising clutter paradox in the nineties and nillies, the advent of mobile phone and tablet technology has been heralded as the holy grail of modern advertising. These new technologies indeed guarantee new and improved communications between brands and customers. They also make sure that at the conscious level, there should be a great deal of integrity put into the marketing efforts with these new channels. As a customer, we should therefore welcome these applications, I believe. These modern technologies also have their impact on more traditional advertising. As I suggest below, this is true for traditional above-the-line advertising as well as for the most basic of all marketing communication tools: the product and its packaging.