Do your own Google research on mobile coupons and you’ll find a plethora of material dating back to about 1999. Unfortunately, most of the material is little more than marketing hype phrased in the future tense… how mobile coupons will become the next big thing! And most of it is written by marketers, advertisers, or journalists with little technology background. For a service that is so closely tied to the technology and the consumer experience, there’s really a lack of attention paid to either the technology or the consumers. “Coupons on your cell phone” seems like such a simple concept that sometimes marketers take for granted the little details that can make or break a user’s mobile coupon experience. They fixate on the first implementation that comes to mind– like the infamous Starbucks model where you get pinged with a coupon text message every time you walk by the coffee shop– because it seems like such a radical and revolutionary way to “do advertising.”
Unfortunately, marketers delude themselves in thinking that the Coupon (with a capital C) is such treasured commodity among consumers that “surely if we push more coupons to the consumer, they will come banging down our doors with thanks and awe!” Hardly, and one need not look past the 1% coupon redemption rates for evidence of the contrary.
So how can we improve our thinking regarding mobile coupons? Well, to start out with, we can look at consumers’ attitudes towards mobile coupons. In the heap of marketing hype on the web, we managed to find one paper actually published in a peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Interactive Marketing. The 2008 paper, titled “Coupons Going Wireless: Determinants of Consumer Intentions to Redeem Mobile Coupons,” looks at consumer attitudes and predispositions to mobile coupons. The findings help elucidate the way consumers approach mobile coupons:
“… Consumers appear to be worried that the mobile way of using coupons might be complicated and cost more (in effort) than the coupon is worth to them.”
“… perceived control significantly affects consumer redemption intentions.”
“As expected, this perceived control is strongly affected by the extent to which consumers fear SMS spamming practices.”
“Consumers are extremely sensitive to such intrusions because the mobile space is considered highly personal and consumers are willing to go to great lengths to protect their personal, mobile space.”
“The results show no significant effect of social norms on intention to redeem mobile coupons.”
“Past use of coupons also does not have a significant influence on the intention to redeem.”
Disclaimer: the paper was a study through a survey in Austria, not the United States. While some of the conclusions surely overlap, it would be erroneous to say that Austrian consumers are like their American counterparts. Nevertheless, we can use the findings as a lens when viewing the mobile coupon implementations here in the U.S.
Our goal at Coupious is to approach the problem of “how can consumers save money” from a user experience perspective. While the benefits of mobile coupons are plenty for merchants and advertisers, the real value comes when we solve the consumer’s problems. That’s why we’ve chosen to make our core service a free, on-demand, non-SMS mobile application. As we roll out our pilot on the Purdue University campus in West Lafayette, Indiana we will publish our findings so that hopefully others too can craft a better consumer experience.
