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October 29 2007
MyVoucherCodes.co.uk tries to put Tesco and Waitrose in the dock alongside Littlewoods
Fear not, dear readers, it's just a touch of humour and opportunism from MyVoucherCodes - this is hardly the International Criminal Court - but this fun and partisan claim has given us a few moments' pause for thought about the whole voucher-swapping culture and retailers' approaches.
We wrote the other day about Littlewoods' clawback of discounts and floated the ideas that
the clawback can't have been the best PR move
all promotions should be profitable and so why worry if they're used, and (more cynically)
whether much of the fuss about 'vouchers in the wild' is simply a cheapskate attempt at guerilla marketing.
The fun folk at MyVoucherCode.co.uk (saving the nation, one coupon at a time) sent us this pacey claim:
Tesco & Waitrose Join Littlewoods in Aggressively Hunting Voucher Code Users
The UK’s leading voucher code website is today naming and shaming Tesco & Waitrose as being another example of penny pinching businesses as they join Littlewoods in trying to hunt down rogue users of discount codes.
We initially thought that this was a belated job application for our new Web Editor (starting next month, patient readers!) but it appears that MyVoucherCodes.co.uk has been contacted by both Tesco and Waitrose and "asked to remove various publicly-available and distributed voucher codes from its site and the supermarkets have also enlisted their own web teams to search and delete as many codes as possible from the internet."
Now, let's be clear. The fact that a voucher has been published does not make it 'free to use as if a God-given right' - there are terms and conditions on the vouchers and retailers are entirely within their rights to offer promotions that are restricted to qualifying people. The question here is not one of right and wrongs, but rather one of planning and being channel-savvy.
Firstly, if a promotion is that expensive or valuable then retailers should take commensurate care in its preparation, distribution and compliance monitoring. To throw £50 notes out of your car window and then tut at passers by who pocket them is not sensible or coherent. There are so many ways to limit promotions and create unique, use-once codes that there's really little excuse for resorting to legalistic means to limit the reach of broadcast vouchers and codes.
This behaviour is one of the reasons that we believe so much of this huffing and puffing is solely to create awareness that these promotions are available... Maybe we're just cynical?
Longer term the concern should be that we're training a generation of shoppers to see the web as a discount, price-driven channel and not a service-led, profitably-priced part of the retail mix.
Dr Mike Baxter, speaking at the recent Internet Retailing conference, noted his research on checkouts and pointed out the adverse affect that "Enter your voucher code" invites had on checkout conversion. Shoppers have a signal that the price they'd moments ago seen as acceptable is now the "sucker's price" and that there's a discount barely a few clicks away. Mike's research showed that many customers who headed off in search of these vouchers got distracted and simply didn't return to complete the purchase.
Vouchers can be a great way of offering a blanket or conditional promotion, or alternatively of offering an highly-targeted valuable inducement or reward.
When marketers, customers and intermediaries collude to cloud the purpose and benefit of vouchers then their value as a feasible promotional mechanism is undermined and they contribute adversely to the noise:signal ratio in emarketing.
Ian Jindal
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