April 20, 2011
Daily Deals Survey: Sometimes There Is More to the Story
By Naor Chazan, Marketing Director, Americas
With investors falling over each other to pour hundreds of millions into Groupon it’s no wonder that a new daily deal website is born practically every day. The jury’s out on what impact this deal bonanza will have on consumers and retailers in the months to come.
To get a snapshot of today’s daily deal picture, Lightspeed Research surveyed 3,300 consumers on our U.S. panel. Given recent stories such as this one in the New York Times suggesting deals may be a drain for some businesses, we were somewhat surprised by the results.
According to our survey, daily deal site buyers do return to businesses after redeeming discounts and they spend more during their visits. Nearly two-thirds (64.6 percent) said that they have returned afterwards to patronize the businesses where they used a daily deal and 60 percent spent more than the deal value while they were there.
Consumers are using daily deals to explore new things. Almost a third of respondents in our survey (60 percent) said a deal influenced them to buy something they were on the fence about. That’s potentially good news for merchants, but we also wanted to know if consumers are adopting “wait for the deal” behaviors that could negatively impact some business. Our survey showed that an overwhelming majority (88 percent) said they wait to make a purchase if they know a deal for a product or service is coming. This is a new dynamic that businesses should certainly explore further.
Daily deals have ecosystem potential. Forty percent of our panelists said that while visiting a merchant or service provider to redeem a deal, they also made purchases at nearby businesses. So we started to wonder about the potential for joint deals. We asked our panelists how likely they’d be to purchase a joint deal such as a museum discount and a meal at a nearby restaurant. Two out of three would be very or extremely likely to do so. This suggests that businesses would be wise to consider creative package deals in the future. We’d certainly go for them.
These are just a few insights from the daily deal research, and we encourage you to find others on your own – a . Uncovering unexpected insights and digging deeper to test new hypotheses is why research is so exciting. After all, there’s always more to a story and sometimes it’s fun to see what you can uncover. We’ll be doing that on this blog from time to time, so stay tuned for more research like this. Or, even better, leave a comment about a topic you’d like us to explore with our panels.
Category:Technology News
Posted on April 20, 2011
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Thank you for posting this. Very interesting indeed, because I actually have never purchased a Groupon or anything similar just because most of the time I am in no need of specific deal. I want deals right now on Sushi, so it would be nice if I could just ask for a deal and the deal would turn on for me right then and there. Call it “Right Now Deals.”
What are your takes on the social graph vs. the interest graph? Maybe you can talk about that in your next panel discussion. Thank you.