Info about Coupons
Coupons
For many people, coupons are a highly useful item which allow them to receive a discount off of many products and services which they use on a day to day basis. For the company that distributes them, they are also important because they encourage people to shop at or use their business over their competitors, and they see a greater amount of profit as a result. Coupons can usually be found in magazines or newspapers, though they are also often found as groups in coupon books. Since the dawn of the information age, digital coupons have come to the fore, and can be found online, either for use on internet stores or to be printed off and used in real world shops.
Coupons can draw their origins back to the end of the 19th century, when in 1887, Coca Cola began promoting their products using innovative marketing techniques, conceived by Asa Candler. One of these techniques was for sales people for Coca Cola to distribute coupons which allowed the holder to receive one free Coca Cola. They began sending them to potential customers via the mail, and they eventually started appearing in various popular magazines. Such was the success of the coupon scheme, it has been calculated that between 1894 and 1913, one in nine Americans had consumed a free Coca Cola, producing a huge total of 8.5 million free drinks. The success of this scheme helped to transform Coca Cola from a small business selling a drink that few people had heard of into a powerful American corporation, and by selling his share, Asa Candler became extremely wealthy.
For a business, coupons can be used to find out how much different groups of people are willing to pay for their products. As a result, different values of coupons are sent out to these various groups, and the company is able to calculate the price sensitivity of their various market segments. Because people who use coupons are considered by retailers to be more price sensitive than people who do not use coupons, the cost of the good without coupons can be increased, whilst the price can be maintained for the price sensitive customers via the use of coupons. As mentioned previously, coupons have started to become common place amongst internet retailers, and rather than generate any data on the price sensitivity of their customers, they are used by online businesses to help distinguish themselves from the huge number of competitors and attract more patronage to their store. Because of their nature- they allow people to pay less for products and services, coupon fraud is a threat to firms which issue them. As a result, businesses which distribute coupons often take measures to prevent fraud, such as using unique ID numbers, barcodes or watermarked paper.
Coupons are not only issued by businesses. Welfare coupons can be issued by the government in order to assist people who are considered to be living close to poverty or who are actually below the poverty line. Figures suggest that over 39 million Americans are living in poverty, and unable to afford even the most basic of goods, such as groceries. Welfare coupons are designed to aid people with very low incomes, and help them to survive on their lower budgets. Some welfare coupons provide aid to specific groups of people, and an example of this is the WIC, which provides food coupons to women, infants and children, and is limited to pregnant women and children under the age of 5. The coupons do not allow the holder to purchase a large amount of groceries, but assist with the basics such as milk, breakfast cereals, eggs and cheese.