Remember the quaint old days of interactive media, when we were promised our lives would be transformed by using a TV remote to order a pizza, buy the clothing worn by our favorite TV characters… and then maybe order some more pizza?

Well, times have changed. Now, interactive media is effortless – all you have to do is activate an app, and your TV or radio will send you coupons automatically, which you can then redeem without even having to think about it.

That’s the promise of Valassis Audible Offers, a new platform formally announced last week by the company that publishes the RedPlum coupon inserts. Valassis describes it as “the first advertising technology and media solution that enables advertisers to transform their broadcast TV, radio and YouTube advertising into targeted and scalable distribution channels for digital offers.”

What that means is, you could find yourself watching or listening to a commercial in your home, in your car or on your mobile device, and imperceptible audio signals embedded in the ad will transmit a coupon for the product being advertised to your phone. The coupon will then be automatically inserted into a mobile wallet, like Apple or Google Wallet. And the next time you shop, and pay with your mobile wallet, the coupon will be applied – no clipping required.

Valassis Audible Offers is not the first platform to transmit coupons via audio signals. But it is the first that aims to make it a seamless experience from start to finish. Other companies’ ultrasonic coupons appear on your phone in the form of an image file or a link to a website. But Valassis Audible Offers can communicate directly with an app, and result in a digital coupon being added straight to your payment account, without any bar code to scan, or a link that you need to remember to open at checkout.

Valassis says its new offers are also an attention-grabber. How many times do you simply tune out when a commercial comes on? Valassis cites research that says nearly half of all smartphone users browse and shop on their mobile devices while watching TV. So advertisers using its new platform can deliver their messages and offers straight to the screen you’re watching, instead of only on the screen you’re not.

“With Valassis Audible Offers, it’s now great to have a consumer on their device while an advertisement is airing,” Valassis CEO Victor Nichols said. “We are making TV and radio advertising multi-purpose at a very low cost.”

Of course, a lot has to happen before you can start taking advantage of these new offers. First, advertisers have to start offering them. Then, retail and shopping apps will need to be able to receive the audio signals – so if your favorite apps start requesting new permissions, seeking access to your mobile device’s microphone, you’ll know why. And then, you’ll need to be a mobile wallet user if you want to be able to automatically redeem the coupons that have found their way into your phone.

Audible Offers is opt-in only, so you won’t get coupons sent to your phone unless you grant permission first. Even so, the platform raises the prospect of unwanted coupons cluttering up your phone and your mobile wallet. But Valassis says the coupons can be targeted to people who are most likely to be interested. If you’ve registered with a particular app and provided your age, gender, address and other personal information when signing up, Audible Offers can use that data to determine whether you get a coupon – or someone else does.

For years, it’s been predicted that all paper coupons will inevitably go digital. In the meantime, though, at least some paper coupons are going audible. Just not the snip-snipping of your scissors, or the ca-ching of the cash register that you’re used to hearing – this time, it seems, savings will be singing a whole new tune.

Image source: Valassis

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The article Listen Up! Now Your Phone Can “Hear” Coupons For You was originally published on Coupons in the News.

Break out the streamers and party tooters – it’s the first day of September, which means it’s time to celebrate “National Coupon Month”! What does one do to commemorate such an occasion? Well, if you’re a couponer, you use coupons just like you do the rest of the year. And if you’re Valassis, you release some new insights about how couponers like to save.

Valassis, the publisher of the RedPlum coupon inserts, is back with its sort-of-annual “Purse String Survey”, which queries couponers about their shopping and saving habits. The survey went on hiatus last year, and while Valassis did a survey the year before that, it appears never to have released the results. So this is the first time in a few years we’ve gotten some insight into what National Coupon Month means for couponers.

And the world of coupons has changed a whole lot in those few short years. Back in 2013, the survey revealed that the vast majority of respondents still preferred paper coupons, with only 20% saying they were digital coupon users. This year, only 52% said they use mostly paper coupons, with 35% saying they use paper and digital coupons equally.

“Savings-oriented consumers today are driven by and utilize deals through all channels,” Valassis declared in releasing its findings. “Shoppers today are savvier than ever before,” added Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle. “Our research indicates that consumers will continue to adopt new methods to shop and find deals.”

As more couponers go online to look for savings, more of us are using our phones to do so. Nearly half of respondents said they have used a savings app, downloaded coupons to a loyalty card or redeemed a coupon code from their mobile device. And more than a third have printed coupons from their phones.

Those phones also come in handy when you’re on the go. 72% said they have looked for coupons or offers on their mobile device while in a store. And more than half said they have visited a store, restaurant or other business after receiving an offer on their mobile device when they were nearby.

One shopping method that’s gaining in popularity, but hasn’t quite taken off yet, is grocery shopping online. There are a number of reasons why many shoppers remain skeptical about buying groceries sight unseen. But those responding to Valassis’ questions agreed with those participating in earlier surveys, in saying that coupons are just as important when buying groceries online, as they are offline. More than half of those surveyed said they would be more likely to shop for groceries online, if they could use more coupons. And two-thirds of younger millennial shoppers agreed.

If couponing has changed this much in just a few years, that’s nothing compared to the way it was during the very first National Coupon Month back in 1998. We weren’t walking around with smartphones back then, loading coupons to a digital account or getting notified when there was a coupon available for a store nearby.

One thing that hasn’t changed much, unfortunately, is the cruel way of commemorating the very first weekend of National Coupon Month. This weekend is Labor Day weekend, which is one of only a few times a year when the coupon providers don’t publish any inserts.

So you might want to hold off on the streamers and party tooters. There’s plenty more time to celebrate National Coupon Month – maybe starting next week.

Photo by dmdonahoo

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The article It’s National Coupon Month – And How Times Have Changed was originally published on Coupons in the News.

Depending on whose statistics you cite – or the types of coupons you tend to clip – coupon values aren’t significantly higher than in years past, and they may even be worse. But by one important measure, a new analysis says they may be a lot better than they seem.

Valassis, the owner of coupon processor NCH Marketing and the publisher of the RedPlum coupon inserts, is out with its own figures about coupon values – and it concludes that we’re saving more money than coupons’ face values might imply.

As a rival to coupon processor Inmar, which released its own coupon analysis earlier this year, NCH produces a rival set of figures based on what it sees from its own clients and the industry as a whole. And while Inmar’s comprehensive, 62-page “Promotion Industry Analysis” presented ample evidence that coupons are not as good as they used to be, Valassis is painting a rosier picture – in a one-page infographic dubbed the “2016 Coupon Savings Report”.

When it comes to coupons’ face values, the two coupon companies differ in their findings. Inmar declared the average coupon value in 2015 to be $1.68, down 2.3% from 2014. Valassis says it was much higher – $1.79, up 4.1% from 2014. Inmar found that the average food coupon value, nonfood coupon value and the total face value of all coupons distributed were all down last year. Valassis found they were up, up and up.

So other than looking at your own food budget year-over-year, or comparing notes with friends, whose figures can you believe when it comes to determining whether using coupons is still as good an investment as it used to be?

You can crunch the numbers in different ways – average face value divided by the number of items you have to purchase, or average face value relative to the price of the product. Valassis chose to compare coupon values to the Consumer Price Index. Valassis reports that the U.S. Department of Labor found that the average price of all consumer goods and services rose a tenth of a percent last year, while coupon values rose 4.1%. The CPI rose 1.6% in 2014, while coupon values rose 6.2%. And roughly the same was true in 2013.

In short, Valassis noted, “marketers have increased coupon face values over the past three years at a pace higher than the Consumer Price Index.”

That led Valassis to conclude that we’re saving more money overall. Regular prices are rising, but coupon values are rising even more.

In total, citing a figure that both Inmar and Valassis seem to agree on, coupon users last year redeemed $3.4 billion worth of coupons. That’s down a couple hundred million dollars from the previous year. But with regular prices also on the rise, you may be saving more money compared to what you might be paying for your groceries, without even realizing it.

“It’s evident that saving continues to be top of mind for shoppers, and coupons are a key factor in planning shopping trips and influencing purchase decisions,” said Wayne Powers, Valassis’ chief revenue and operating officer.

Of course, these are all last year’s numbers. Inmar has already reported that coupon values in the first half of this year are still in decline. And the CPI has been creeping upward. So, unless coupon issuers step up their game, if you feel like you’re spending more and saving less by the time the “2017 Coupon Savings Report” comes out – you may turn out to be right.

Photo by Judith E. Bell

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The article Coupon Values May Be Better Than You Think was originally published on Coupons in the News.

If you buy coupons online, did your favorite seller have a little less to offer this past week? If you sell coupons online, did your supplier come up a little short?

Many people who sell coupons online, get their inserts from “sources” all over the country. But several sellers reported that they were not able to get their regular supply of coupon inserts from the Los Angeles area last weekend, when Procter & Gamble’s brandSAVER was published. The sellers came up with various explanations and excuses for the shortfall. But the real explanation could be that the coupon publishers are catching onto what they’re doing – and working harder to stop them.

“California ended up not getting early PG inserts!” one Facebook coupon seller told followers last week. “Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, the warehouse will not have P&G this week. It is not available to any supplier or anything in Southern California,” an Instagram insert seller wrote. “PG has gone digital in Los Angeles,” a third seller concluded.

Gone digital? Nice try. Newspaper subscribers and newsstand shoppers had no trouble getting their P&G inserts in their papers last weekend. So why did so many resellers have such a hard time – and why from Los Angeles in particular?

“I work with many suppliers and have been in contact with every single one of them since Sunday as soon as I heard that there were no P&G,” one seller wrote on Instagram. “I just received my last confirmation from the last supplier confirming that there are no P&G in the warehouse.”

The insert providers won’t confirm, but neither will they deny, that it’s all because they planned it that way.

Coupon sales have become a big business in recent years, with the largest sellers offering thousands and even tens of thousands of inserts each week. Most no longer bother to pretend that they’re getting all of these coupons by buying tens of thousands of individual copies of the Sunday newspaper and pulling out the inserts themselves – especially since many sellers get their inserts days before the Sunday paper comes out, and many get them from out of state. Instead, the inserts come from “suppliers” who are walking out of warehouses with pallets of coupon inserts that are intended to be included in newspapers or home-delivered advertising supplements.

In short, the coupon industry points out, most of the bulk inserts that are offered for sale online are very likely stolen property.

So coupon publishers and local newspapers have been trying to stop this illicit flow of inserts from warehouses to sellers. A couple of years ago, more than a dozen newspapers across the country offered a reward for information about anyone obtaining “quantities of coupon inserts through unauthorized methods”. They tried removing inserts from some local newspapers and delivering them via mail instead. And police got involved in at least a couple of recent cases, when four people were arrested in connection with the theft of inserts from a South Carolina newspaper distribution facility, and a police officer was charged with helping himself to inserts from a Rhode Island newspaper distribution facility, and giving them to his wife to sell online.

But all of these efforts did little to stop the flow of coupon inserts into suppliers’ and sellers’ hands. So suspicion began turning to other potential problem areas – not local newspaper distribution centers, but separate facilities that bundle and prepare advertising supplements for home delivery. This past August, a former employee of just such a facility was arrested in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He’s accused of taking more than 100 bundles of ads and coupons that were meant to be included in a weekly ad supplement, and supplying them to a local coupon seller.

These ad supplements are typically the types that are tossed onto your driveway or stuffed into your mailbox. They’re a way for advertisers and coupon publishers to reach more consumers, particularly those who don’t already receive the ads and coupons by subscribing to their local newspaper.

One such supplement in the Los Angeles area is the “California Weekend Direct”. Its name often features prominently on the spine of many inserts offered by online coupon sellers (see the inset in the image above, from an insert seller based in Florida – quite a distance from California).

That particular seller is one of many that is not currently offering P&G brandSAVERs from the California Weekend Direct, or from anywhere in Los Angeles. Could it be, then, that those empty warehouses this past week belonged to the distributor of the California Weekend Direct? And if so – why?

Valassis, which distributes the P&G inserts, declined to “discuss specific clients or situations” in a statement to Coupons in the News. But it admitted putting into practice “a comprehensive security process to ensure appropriate levels of protection and security are provided throughout the distribution process. When warranted, Valassis, in cooperation with its partners and clients, will take appropriate action to address or eliminate identified sources of potential security breaches.”

“Appropriate action”, as in, declining to deliver brandSAVER inserts to a facility whose product is known to end up in the hands of online coupon sellers? Valassis wouldn’t say.

The head of CIPS Marketing Group, which distributes the California Weekend Direct, also declined to discuss his company’s relations with specific advertisers. But he acknowledged that coupon providers are becoming increasingly concerned about the illicit distribution of their inserts – and that preventing them from falling into the wrong hands isn’t always easy. “It always surprises me that there’s a black market for this,” CIPS President & CEO Manuel Collazo told Coupons in the News. “We’ve probably been involved in half a dozen conversations about coupon insert security. The coupon advertisers want more security all the time.”

So how secure were the inserts pictured in the inset above, that apparently came from his warehouse? “We’re constantly trying to upgrade security, but we’re working in a facility that wasn’t built yesterday,” he conceded.

The lack of available P&G inserts in Los Angeles certainly got many sellers’ attention this past week. But several of them simply turned to other sources in other parts of the country to obtain their inserts. So the problem is one that the industry won’t be able to solve by simply shutting off the supply from just one city.

But it’s a start. So the next time large-scale insert sellers report they’re having a hard time getting their illicitly-obtained coupons from a certain part of the country, it may be more by design than coincidence. And if it gets to the point that the sellers begin to rethink their line of work – well, perhaps that’s precisely the point.

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The article Why Coupon Sellers’ Supplies Were Suddenly Cut Off was originally published on Coupons in the News.

If you looked really, really closely, you might have seen a new warning across the top of this past weekend’s RedPlum coupon inserts. But that tiny notification is only part of the story.

Valassis, the publisher of the RedPlum inserts, is doubling down on its recent efforts to thwart coupon insert sellers. A month after yanking Procter & Gamble’s brandSAVER from a suspected insert-theft problem area, it’s now done the same with its own inserts. And other coupon inserts, in other parts of the country, could be next.

It’s all happening right now in Southern California, an area where coupon inserts are in high demand among buyers, sellers – and thieves. Large-scale sellers who peddle thousands of inserts online each week have discovered that RedPlum inserts from that region are now particularly hard to find. Their realization comes a month after the December edition of the P&G insert also became scarce.

That’s because Valassis distributes P&G’s inserts in Southern California. And last month, it declined to deliver them to a particular distribution center whose security was determined to be suspect. The reaction from many insert sellers, who suddenly found that they could no longer get their regular supply of brandSAVERs from the Los Angeles area, seemed to confirm P&G’s and Valassis’ suspicions – enough so, that Valassis now appears to be withholding its RedPlum inserts from the same facility.

Coupon publishers have long tried to discourage the buying and selling of coupons, by implying that it’s illegal when it’s technically not. But the largest sellers are in a class of their own. Many of them get mint-condition inserts by the pallet, from “suppliers” who are simply stealing them from warehouses long before they’re opened, sorted, placed into Sunday newspapers or mailers, and delivered to their intended recipients. And that is definitely illegal. The publishers’ challenge has been determining where the thefts are regularly occurring – and how to stop them.

They’ve pleaded with the public for information. They’ve cheered when there have been isolated arrests of suspected coupon insert thieves. But now, in Southern California, they finally appear to be making some serious headway in stopping the thefts and cutting off the sellers’ ill-gotten supplies.

“January PG [P&G] is a mess,” one frustrated insert seller told customers last week. “I have had supplier after supplier back out on deals I had worked out with them. 3 suppliers to be exact. I was given excuse after excuse and constant delays.” Other sellers expressed similar concerns: “I got word that LA is now going to have a real hard time getting RP [RedPlum] now. We have an extremely hard time with PG these past couple months and now it seems it will be the same with RP.” Another pleaded for understanding: “To everyone who gets inserts from me, I hope you all understand that some things are out of my control.”

In order to ensure that the P&G and RedPlum inserts are getting to their rightful recipients, Valassis has sent notices to households all across Southern California that used to have the inserts dropped on their doorsteps. No longer will the inserts be hand-delivered from a facility where inserts were disappearing out the back door. Now, they’ll be delivered via the U.S. mail. “Coming in the mail, not the newspaper,” the notices read. “This way, more families can save more time and money.”

In recent years, Valassis has chosen to distribute coupon inserts via mail in certain regions when it became more economical to do so, or when it could reach more households that way as compared to the traditional method of delivering inserts in the Sunday newspaper. In Los Angeles, however, major newspapers like the L.A. Times still contain all of the coupon inserts. So Valassis’ latest move appears to be not so much a shift from newspaper distribution to mail delivery, as it is a clear effort to obstruct the insert sellers.

And then there’s that warning atop the RedPlum inserts themselves (click on the image above for a closer look). “AVOID COUPON FRAUD,” it reads. “The coupons in this booklet are void under the manufacturer’s rules if they are bought or sold. These booklets are intended for individual home or newspaper distribution. If you are buying or selling these booklets in bulk, you are likely trafficking in stolen property, which is illegal under state and federal law.”

Written in tiny, barely legible print, the warning is unlikely to scare off any buyers or sellers. It reads more like a cover-all-the-bases legal notice, so buyers and sellers can’t claim that no one ever told them what they were doing may well be illegal. Valassis representatives did not respond to a request for comment about the rationale behind publishing the notice.

In fact, Valassis isn’t sharing many specifics at all about its recent actions to combat insert sellers. When asked about the P&G inserts’ availability in Southern California last month, Valassis replied quickly – but vaguely – with a prepared statement: “Valassis remains committed to the secure delivery of our clients’ coupons and promotions. While we will not discuss specific clients or situations, we can state that Valassis utilizes a comprehensive security process to assure appropriate levels of protection and security are provided throughout the distribution process. When warranted, Valassis, in cooperation with its partners and clients, will take appropriate action to address or eliminate identified sources of potential security breaches.”

With its apparent success in cutting off the supply of illicitly-obtained coupon inserts in the Los Angeles area, it is perhaps safe to assume that this is only the beginning of Valassis’ efforts to choke off insert sellers’ supplies, and not the end. The insert publishers are working to identify other weak spots in the coupon insert supply chain, which could be enabling the theft and sale of inserts from other hot spots like Florida, Texas and Atlanta.

That warning printed on the RedPlum inserts may be too tiny to be effective by itself. But in the end, if the sellers can no longer get a hold of any more inserts, Valassis’ actions may end up speaking louder than its words.

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The article RedPlum Publisher Steps Up Battle Against Coupon Sellers was originally published on Coupons in the News.

With a number of retailers cutting back on coupons and deals to pursue a new “everyday low prices” strategy, what will become of couponing as we know it? Are coupons on the way out?

According to a new survey – not even close. Coupons are still plenty popular, with nine out of ten grocery shoppers saying they use them. But many are opting for digital coupons these days, which raises the rephrased question – are paper coupons on their way out?

The “2K17” edition of Valassis’ Coupon Intelligence Report finds that if brands want our business, they’d better make sure their coupons are available wherever, and in whatever form, we might look for them.

Previous editions of the annual report have focused on generational differences among couponers, dispelling the notions that younger shoppers don’t use coupons or that coupons are on the way out altogether.

The latest edition acknowledges that, yes, there’s a definite shift to digital happening these days. But paper coupons are still alive and well. And the best strategy – for both shoppers and brands – is to use some of both.

“Results indicate that today’s consumers are ‘always connected’ and becoming increasingly adept at incorporating both print and digital coupons as they plan their shopping activities,” the report reads.

Overall, an overwhelming 90% of shoppers say they use coupons in one form or another – the same percentage as last year. And interestingly, that percentage jumps to 94% among millennials, making them the only demographic that actually increased their coupon use over last year. The most common source of those savings are traditional paper coupons, deals in store circulars and print-at-home coupons.

The report also notes that there’s been a significant increase in shoppers who say they “always” use coupons. 15% said so this year, up from 10% last year. And those who say they rarely or never use coupons dropped from 25% to 19%. In addition, 41% of coupon users said they’re using more coupons than they did last year, while only 13% said they’re using less. 30% increased their use of paper coupons, while 36% used more digital offers.

When asked their preferred source of coupons, 44% said they prefer to get coupons in the mail, making that the number-one choice. But get this – 37% like getting coupons from newspaper inserts, while 37% prefer digital load-to-card coupons.

It’s a tie! So if paper and digital are both popular – why would anyone force us to choose between one or the other? “Care should be taken to account for all the ways shoppers engage with coupons and discounts, both online and offline,” Valassis cautions.

Other findings focus on when we plan our coupon use. 91% of shoppers make a list before going to the store, with 84% looking for coupons during that process. And 71% will plan to buy a product only if they have a coupon for it. “If brands want to be part of the consumer’s initial consideration set, it is important to get in front of shoppers at home during list creation and preliminary decision-making,” the report advises.

But that doesn’t mean coupons can’t change our mind once we arrive at the store. 86% of those surveyed said they have made a purchase after coming across a good deal in the store. And 61% have downloaded digital coupons during their shopping trip, right there in the grocery aisle. Regardless of how you feel about paper versus digital coupons, there’s definitely a digital convenience factor – if you’re making an unplanned purchase, you’re unlikely to stop what you’re doing and run home to look for a paper coupon. Unless you regularly shop with a fully-stocked coupon binder, your best bet is to use your phone and see if there’s a digital coupon available. And apparently many of us are doing just that.

Coupons themselves can also influence where we shop. 77% consider a store’s paper coupon policy when deciding where to shop. 67% base their decision on their ability to use digital coupons there. And 82% will switch stores to take advantage of weekly specials.

Valassis also notes that “the influence of coupons and other discounts continues beyond the purchase transaction.” That’s because shoppers are embracing cash-back apps more than ever. 53% of all shoppers – and 82% of parents, in particular – scan their receipts using apps like Ibotta or Checkout 51, to earn rebates once they get home.

So now, coupons and discounts in all of their many forms can influence our shopping behavior before, during and after our shopping trips.

“It is important for marketers to understand that the shopper journey is not defined at one specific point,” Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle said in a statement. “Our research indicates that there is an opportunity for brands to influence how shoppers plan, where they shop and the products they buy – which can be achieved by dynamically targeting the right audiences with a strategic combination of print and digital incentives.”

In other words, make sure there are coupons available however and wherever we choose to use them. Then maybe we can stop debating the merits of paper versus digital – and start fully benefiting from them both.

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The article Coupons: They’re Not Dead Yet! was originally published on Coupons in the News.

The largest retail coupon site in the country, and one of the largest traditional paper and printable coupon providers, are coming together under the same corporate umbrella – which could help make coupons of all types even more accessible.

Harland Clarke Holdings, the owner of RedPlum publisher Valassis, has announced its purchase of the coupon code site RetailMeNot, in a deal valued at $630 million.

“By bringing together Valassis’ unmatched quantity of genuine valuable offers from its large, diversified client base with RetailMeNot’s premier digital audience distribution and brand, the companies’ combined offerings will become the consumer savings destination of choice,” the companies said in a joint announcement.

Together, the companies say they will be able to create “an omni-channel media network with tens of thousands of advertisers reaching hundreds of millions of consumers around the world.”

“This acquisition will create one of the most powerful inventories of consumer offers and savings to benefit our retailer and consumer goods clients and their hundreds of millions of consumers,” Harland Clarke spokesperson Debbie Serot told Coupons in the News. “We are excited about the positive impact this will have on consumers and our clients.”

So how will the acquisition affect you? Could RetailMeNot start offering RedPlum grocery coupons, or might RedPlum begin offering retailer coupon codes to use when shopping online?

Neither is a far-fetched idea – because both have happened before.

Several years and acquisitions ago, when Valassis was an independent company and RetailMeNot was an Australia-based startup, the two companies joined forces in 2009 to make RedPlum printable coupons available on RetailMeNot. “Through this partnership, we will be able to extend our valuable, money-saving coupons to RetailMeNot.com’s millions of users,” Valassis said at the time. “Our goal is to make RetailMeNot.com the first place consumers look for coupons online,” RetailMeNot added, as it aimed to become a one-stop shop for all types of coupons.

That partnership lasted a few years, until RetailMeNot replaced the RedPlum coupons with Catalina’s Coupon Network offers, then removed the printable grocery coupons altogether once Catalina pulled the plug on Coupon Network.

At roughly the same time, Valassis relaunched Save.com, a onetime precursor to RedPlum, as a site dedicated to retailer coupon codes. You know, just like RetailMeNot.

“Redplum.com has established itself as a trusted site,” the company said back in 2010. “We are building on that reputation as a reliable source of online deals and extending it to the coupon code industry through Save.com.”

But Save.com never really caught on as a viable competitor to RetailMeNot. Valassis even tried a more in-your-face approach by briefly redirecting RedPlum.com to Save.com/coupons, hosting all of its coupons on the same site, before giving up on Save.com altogether in 2013.

Soon after, Valassis was acquired by Harland Clarke. And now Harland Clarke is adding RetailMeNot to its holdings. So the two former business partners, and former competitors, are now corporate cousins. Valassis gets what it wanted – a successful online coupon code site, and RetailMeNot gets what it wanted – access to grocery coupons that could help make it a one-stop-shop for online couponers.

The combination also brings into the fold RetailMeNot’s highly successful mobile app, an area in which Valassis has been lagging. With so much happening on mobile these days, Valassis is still merely tinkering with the ability to print coupons via mobile devices, a feature that competitor Coupons.com has offered for years.

For now, though, Harland Clarke isn’t saying much about possible synergies. “Following the close of the sale, RetailMeNot will operate as a standalone business in the Harland Clarke Holdings portfolio,” Serot said. “There are no plans to change the name.” No such assurance was given about RedPlum, so considering the company was so quick to ditch its RedPlum branding to help prop up Save.com, it’s not out of the question that RedPlum might someday get absorbed into the better-known RetailMeNot brand.

So with its RedPlum coupon inserts number-two to SmartSource, and its RedPlum.com printable coupons a distant competitor to Coupons.com, Valassis’ parent company finally gets to be number-one in at least one category of coupons, with RetailMeNot’s dominance in online coupon codes. Time will tell, whether what’s good for Harland Clarke, turns out to be good for couponers as well.

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The article RedPlum Owner Buys RetailMeNot was originally published on Coupons in the News.

Coupons are a constant at the grocery store, and plentiful in places like department stores. But restaurants seem to have a love-hate relationship with coupons. Many worry that coupons will cheapen their brand, and attract customers who are more interested in looking for a deal than a good meal.

But a new study warns restaurants not to count coupons out – because many of their potential customers can’t get enough of them.

Valassis has released new survey results that show “coupons and promotions are highly impactful in driving restaurant traffic and customer engagement.”

When choosing a restaurant, 32% of those surveyed said they’re most motivated by “price offers,” followed by 29% who cited coupons and “value menus”.

Fathers are the biggest proponent of saving money when the family goes out to eat. 45% of dads surveyed said coupons are the main motivator in deciding where to dine.

Among the other interesting findings from the survey – 48% said they would be more likely to visit a restaurant on their commute to or from work if they received coupons. 42% said they search the internet or use apps to find restaurant coupons. And 15% said paper coupons received at home are the main motivator for trying a menu item they normally wouldn’t order.

“Consumers expect ready access to deals at home, work and on the go as they look for ways to save money and make dining out affordable,” Valassis chief marketing officer Curtis Tingle said in a statement announcing the survey results. “The right deal, at the right time can activate a consumer who may not have been considering a restaurant otherwise.”

Valassis is encouraging restaurants to offer more coupons and deals, at a time when restaurant visits are declining. The NPD Group reports that there were close to 62 billion visits made to restaurants and other food service outlets last year, which sounds like a lot, but it’s down slightly from the previous year.

NPD’s own recent survey found that the majority of respondents who had cut back on eating out said it was because they were watching their spending, and “restaurant prices are too high”. Infrequent restaurant diners told NPD that regular discounts – especially discounts of their own choosing – could entice them to visit restaurants more.

Yet another recent survey, by Valassis’ soon-to-be corporate cousin RetailMeNot, found that nine out of ten diners have looked for a restaurant deal at least once, with one in three using a digital coupon.

And digital is where NPD says the growth will be, allowing restaurants to better reach potential customers and offer them deals. It predicts that more restaurants will develop loyalty programs, many of them app-based, and that “mobile ordering will grow exponentially.”

Valassis says it all points to would-be diners who are hungry for deals. “If restaurateurs and marketers aren’t tuned in to these types of insights, they are missing out on a sizable opportunity and may be underestimating the importance of engaging consumers with relevant messages,” the company warns.

So if there’s a restaurant you’ve been wanting to visit, but don’t want to pay full price, be on the lookout for coupons. And if there aren’t any – it could end up costing the restaurant more than it costs you.

Photo by Matt McGee

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The article Diners Want Deals: Restaurants Urged to Offer More Coupons was originally published on Coupons in the News.

Tired of giving ties for Father’s Day? If you’re still considering what to get for dear old Dad on Sunday, consider the results of a new survey –

Dads want coupons!

And no, not those homemade “good for one free lawn mowing without complaining” coupons. Dads prefer the real thing.

That’s according to Valassis, the publisher of the RedPlum coupon inserts. In honor of Father’s Day, Valassis plucked out some previously unreleased dad-related findings from the recent “2K17” edition of its Coupon Intelligence Report.

“Dads are just as interested as moms in saving money on purchases,” Valassis found, “and in some cases, their coupon zeal surpasses that of their female counterpart.”

It seems there’s something about having a family to feed, that makes both moms and dads more interested in coupons than their single friends. While 98% of moms in the survey said they use coupons at the grocery store, a slightly lesser but still impressive 96% of dads said the same – compared to 90% of all adults.

In addition, 96% of dads say coupons influence what they add to their shopping list, 85% plan to buy a product only if they have a coupon (compared to 71% of all adults) and 54% of dads have increased their shopping at stores other than their main store to get better deals (compared to 33% of all adults).

What really sets dads apart from moms is their use of mobile apps. Dads seem to like savings gizmos, while more moms prefer paper. 81% of fathers use a coupon app when grocery shopping, compared to 62% of mothers. 74% of fathers use in-store rewards apps, compared to 54% of mothers. And 66% of dads use a deal comparison app, compared to just 41% of moms.

The findings may be surprising to some, who hold the traditional idea that men are not big grocery shoppers, let alone couponers. But that’s changing.

According to a study released in April by the in-store behavior analytics company VideoMining, women now represent just 51% of grocery store shoppers. So more men are doing their part. As it turns out, they have been for several years now, as a 2013 survey by retail consulting firm Daymon Worldwide found roughly the same thing.

But that survey also found that men weren’t so great at couponing. Only 15% of the male grocery shoppers who were surveyed clipped any coupons before grocery shopping. Only 25% checked the store’s sales circular before shopping, and just 30% did any pre-shop meal planning.

The newer Valassis survey suggests that men become more interested in saving when they become fathers. And given dads’ apparent propensity for using their phones to save, the increasing availability of digital savings options these days also appears to be increasing men’s overall coupon use.

“Dads are readily influenced by coupons and other relevant discounts before, during and after their shopping journey,” Valassis chief marketing officer Curtis Tingle concluded. “Marketers should take these findings into consideration as they seek to fully understand how dads shop.”

So skip the tie this Father’s Day. If you want Dad to spend the day doing what he really enjoys – send him to the store.

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The article What Does Dad Want for Father’s Day? Coupons! was originally published on Coupons in the News.

It’s deja vu all over again.

Nearly a decade ago, couponers were up in arms as RedPlum coupon inserts began disappearing from Sunday newspapers all over the country. At the time, RedPlum publisher Valassis was looking to boost distribution by delivering inserts through the mail instead. Eventually, the experiment tapered off and the inserts returned to most major cities’ Sunday papers.

But now, Valassis is removing inserts from big-city newspapers again – for entirely different reasons.

Atlanta is the latest city to be affected. Couponers who opened their Atlanta Journal-Constitution this past Sunday were expecting to see three RedPlum inserts. Instead, they got none. Effective immediately, the paper will no longer include RedPlum or Procter & Gamble’s brandSAVER inserts, which Valassis also distributes.

It’s the same unpleasant surprise that couponers in Detroit and Phoenix experienced back in May. Many Los Angeles-area residents have been doing without P&G inserts since late last year, and Tampa couponers have had RedPlum-free Sunday newspapers for several years now. And more big cities are expected to be added to that list in the coming weeks and months.

The reason this time is not to boost distribution by sending inserts through the mail – but to keep inserts out of the hands of thieves who supply them to various online insert sellers and “clipping services”.

In response to numerous specific questions from Coupons in the News about its efforts to thwart the diversion of what are known in the business as free-standing inserts (FSIs), Valassis offered only a brief circumspect statement that just sort-of confirmed its motives. “As part of Valassis’ overall distribution strategy, we recently shifted delivery of the FSI from newspaper to shared mail in Atlanta. Our commitment to securely place relevant promotions into the hands of consumers while meeting our clients’ needs is among our key considerations when it comes to distribution.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, meanwhile, was more forthcoming. “The stated reason given by Valassis was that they were removing their FSIs from the major daily newspapers due to a high incidence of inserts being stolen and resold online,” Gabrielle Austin, Director of Major Retail, Centralized Accounts for AJC owner Cox Media Group, told Coupons in the News. “Valassis claimed to have tracked the origin of inserts that are being made available for sale, and have determined that they are coming from certain cities, so they’ve chosen to no longer make them available via the major newspapers in those cities.”

That echoes what the Tampa Tribune said back in 2014, the first time inserts were removed from specific newspapers in order to combat theft. “One of the major factors was coupon fraud in the market,” the Tribune’s Vice President of Advertising Joe Gess told Coupons in the News at the time. He said coupons identified as coming from Tampa inserts were being redeemed at three times the national rate, indicating that they were being distributed far beyond the market for which they were intended. And since manufacturers only budget for a certain percentage of their coupons to be redeemed, the redistribution of their offers causes them to pay out more than they anticipated – which can cause them to offer fewer and less valuable coupons in the future.

Up til now, Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Tampa have been among the most common sources of coupon inserts sold online – and not necessarily because they have the best coupons. It’s because the distribution channels there apparently have the most lax security. Somewhere along the supply chain, from the time inserts are printed, packed up, delivered to distribution facilities, stuffed into Sunday papers and delivered to newsstands and subscribers, bundles of inserts are disappearing and turning up for sale on the coupon “black market”.

Some sellers hide from public view in invitation-only Instagram or Facebook groups, where they boast about the thousands of inserts they obtain from “suppliers”, whose ability to get their hands on shrink-wrapped pallets of coupons is never quite explained. Other sellers are quite open about their activities, running publicly-accessible websites where they claim to buy extra copies of the Sunday paper in order to get extra coupon inserts to sell.

Perhaps some of them do. But how many are really buying thousands of newspapers, from multiple different cities, and somehow making the coupons available for sale days or even weeks before the Sunday papers are even printed?

If there are any questions about where some “suppliers” are getting their inserts, they’ve been answered when several suppliers have been caught in the act of stealing them. Just last month, a Rhode Island police officer was convicted of breaking into a newspaper distribution facility to steal inserts, which his wife then allegedly sold on Instagram. Last year, two South Carolina men were convicted of walking right into a newspaper distribution facility to steal coupons by the bundle, in order to provide them to online insert sellers.

But “suppliers” aren’t always guilty of breaking and entering. Often, insert theft is an inside job. Earlier this year, a former newspaper employee in Pennsylvania was convicted of using his connections to gain access to hundreds of insert bundles, which he intended to provide to an online seller.

So what are newspapers doing about the problem of all of those coupon inserts walking right out their back doors? Not enough, according to the insert publishers. The Tampa Tribune and several other big-city newspapers worked with SmartSource publisher News America Marketing several years ago, to ask the public and their own employees for information about who was responsible for stealing and selling so many inserts. The goal, News America Marketing’s Senior Vice President of Media Bob Cole explained to Coupons in the News at the time, was to “receive actionable leads that will result in identifying the individuals responsible for stealing the coupon inserts, and shutting down the people selling them.”

That effort led to some successes, Cole said. But apparently not enough of them. While securing coupon inserts and preventing thieves from walking off with them wouldn’t seem to be difficult, some claim that it is. The head of a Southern California company that distributed P&G inserts – until Valassis cut them off last year – said there was only so much that could be done. “We’re constantly trying to upgrade security, but we’re working in a facility that wasn’t built yesterday,” CIPS Marketing Group President & CEO Manuel Collazo told Coupons in the News in December.

“The potential for theft during Valassis’ manufacturing, printing and distribution processes are numerous,” the AJC’s Austin told Coupons in the News. While Valassis’ decision to pull its inserts from the paper appears to indicate it’s not satisfied with the AJC’s security protocols, Austin defends the paper’s actions. “The AJC has been engaged for several months with other major newspaper groups to reinforce and share best security practices, and track if coupon inserts are being stolen while under the newspaper’s jurisdiction. To date we have not been able to substantiate insert theft occurring at our docks and/or inserting facilities.”

But now it won’t have that problem any longer, because it won’t have any RedPlum or P&G inserts to secure. Neither Valassis nor the AJC offered any indication of whether Valassis might eventually reverse its decision, should the security situation improve in the future.

Couponers in Atlanta, like those before them in Phoenix, Detroit, Los Angeles and Tampa, are understandably upset about losing their coupon inserts. Their Sunday papers will still include SmartSource coupons. And while the AJC says P&G brandSAVERs won’t be mailed, many residents will receive their RedPlum inserts in their mailboxes now. That’s good enough for some, but not for those who like to buy a few extra papers for a few extra inserts.

So some upset couponers are searching for someone to blame. And many are directing their ire at Valassis. “Your decision to stop carrying in the Detroit Free Press has greatly hurt my family,” one commenter wrote on RedPlum’s Facebook page, back when Detroit lost its inserts. “Bad business move on your part!” another added. One commenter went even further: “I will be contacting each and every advertiser that had coupons in your inserts today and informing them that I will not be purchasing their products any longer. Why should I, if I have to pay more than others to purchase them?”

One might accuse Valassis of killing a fly with a sledgehammer, trying to thwart a handful of coupon thieves by dropping coupon nukes on entire cities at a time. Sure, they’re wiping out the thieves, but they’re causing millions of honest couponers to get caught in the fallout.

So you can certainly quibble with Valassis’ tactics – but not necessarily its motives. After all, coupon publishers can’t be expected to stand idly by while criminals make a profit from stealing their coupons that are meant to be provided to consumers for free. So ultimately, it’s the thieves themselves who are to blame – along with the newspapers and distributors who have shown themselves to be helpless about stopping them.

For years, concerned couponers have worried that the coupon scammers and abusers are going to end up ruining it for everyone. Now, if your paper is missing its RedPlum and P&G inserts – or if your city is next on the list to lose them – you may find that the notion of a few ruining it for the many, has never been so true.

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The article RedPlum and P&G Inserts Removed From Major Cities: Could Yours Be Next? was originally published on Coupons in the News.

Think back to how you were couponing in 1998, if you even were back then. Sunday newspapers were still the main coupon delivery system, printable coupons were just getting started (Coupons.com was founded that year), and 1998 was just a few years removed from the biggest year for coupon redemption in history.

With that backdrop, National Coupon Month was founded to celebrate and promote the coupon industry.

Fast forward to today, and it’s now officially the 20th annual National Coupon Month. But times are changing – coupon policies have been tightening up, as the industry continues to suffer from an “extreme couponing” hangover, and there are a lot of new ways to shop and save without relying on coupons at all. As a result, coupon use has been suffering a precipitous decline lately. So is there really much to celebrate?

The only noteworthy event on the National Coupon Month calendar in recent years has been the release of Valassis’ annual “RedPlum Purse String Survey” (and even that took a year or two off not so long ago). The survey aims to take the pulse of couponers to find out how they’re shopping, and saving.

This year’s survey concludes that, despite the advent of grocery delivery and online shopping, couponers are still prioritizing savings.

53% of those surveyed said they spend two hours or more every week looking for coupons and deals. And about a quarter of millennials and moms spend twice as long – more than four hours a week – searching for savings.

When it comes to a preference for paper versus digital coupons, the results are largely unchanged from last year. An equal number of survey respondents – about 50% each – chose one or the other. But 41% said they use both paper and digital coupons equally, representing a 6 percentage point increase from last year.

Many shoppers are slowly beginning to warm to online grocery shopping. 31% said they are having their groceries delivered more often than they did last year, while 15% said they’ve increased their use of buy-online-pick-up-in-store services. But, reflecting the results of other recent surveys, 57% of respondents – and 73% of millennials – said they would be more likely to buy groceries online if they could use more coupons while doing so.

Couponers are more eagerly embracing technology when it comes to their mobile devices. 76% of survey respondents said they use their mobile devices in stores to look for coupons and discounts while they shop. That percentage soars to 93% among millennials. Most use their devices to access a savings app, with others reporting that they download digital coupons, redeem a coupon code or print a coupon offer. And more than half of respondents said they have visited a store after receiving an offer on their mobile device when they were near that location.

“Consumers are embracing a multitude of channels to browse, research, compare prices and make purchases,” said Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle. “They want to be able to redeem print and digital deals both in-store and online.”

So that’s the state of couponing this National Coupon Month. Considering that printable coupons were a revolutionary new idea, and no one was using a mobile device to redeem coupons, times have certainly changed since National Coupon Month was first observed. Coupon use may be down, but 20 years from now, who knows? Entirely new couponing platforms may be introduced that we haven’t even dreamed of yet.

And that may truly give us something to celebrate.

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The article Shoppers Celebrate National Coupon Month, Sort Of was originally published on Coupons in the News.

They may be competitors in the coupon insert business. But since both the RedPlum and SmartSource inserts appear side-by-side in most Sunday newspapers each week, it must be a friendly competition – right?

Hardly. A bitter dispute between the inserts’ parent companies that once appeared to be over, has once again landed back in a federal court – more than a decade after it all started.

Valassis, best known as the publisher of the RedPlum inserts, earned a federal judge’s approval this week to transfer its lawsuit against SmartSource publisher News America Marketing from Michigan to a New York court, effectively reopening the case that was until now being overseen by an expert panel in lieu of a trial in federal court.

The bad blood between the two companies dates back to 2006, the first time Valassis sued News America. Valassis accused its larger competitor of monopolizing the in-store coupon and advertising business, and using that alleged monopoly to strong-arm clients into offering coupons in the SmartSource Sunday inserts instead of in RedPlum. Four years later, News America agreed to pay $500 million to settle the case.

And then in 2013, Valassis sued again, claiming that News America hadn’t changed its anticompetitive tactics even after the settlement. The judge referred the whole thing to a panel of antitrust experts to referee the dispute. That panel earlier this year found that Valassis could not relitigate the claims related to coupon inserts that it made in its first lawsuit. But the panel left open the question of whether Valassis could continue to pursue its complaints that News America is monopolizing the in-store promotions business.

If you have a long memory, you may recall that Valassis once had its own in-store blinkie coupon machines. Now, the only blinkies you’re likely to find in stores are branded as SmartSource. Other companies once provided ads on shopping carts, on grocery shelves or in the form of floor decals – but today, the only ads you’re likely to see there are from SmartSource.

And Valassis says there’s a reason for that. “News has utilized unethical, unfair and anticompetitive strategies to prevent Valassis from gaining a foothold in the market for in-store advertising and promotions,” its 2013 lawsuit claimed. Those strategies allegedly included locking retailers and product manufacturers into long-term contracts, and even going so far as physically removing and replacing Valassis’ in-store coupons and ads with its own.

News America says it’s simply sour grapes, because News America has been successful where its competitors have not. In its response to Valassis’ renewed lawsuit, News America snarkily wondered why, even after a $500 million settlement, Valassis apparently never “put any of that money toward expanding its output or lowering its prices in order to more effectively compete.”

In asking for the case to be reopened or transferred to a New York federal court, Valassis claimed its in-store marketing complaints were beyond the scope of what the antitrust experts were empaneled to hear. “The panel has run its course,” Valassis argued.

“In March 2016, this Court issued an order referring all ‘remaining claims’ in this action to a Panel of Special Masters,” News America shot back. “Valassis’s motion should be seen for what it is: an untimely and inappropriate attempt by Valassis to relitigate issues the Court decided a year ago, and to engage in judge shopping.”

The federal judge overseeing the case in Michigan rejected that view and granted Valassis’ request to transfer the case from Michigan, and the expert panel, to a federal court in New York. So the two sides are poised to face off in court yet again – in an eleven-year, multi-million-dollar dispute that shows no signs of ending any time soon.

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The article Coupon Insert Publishers Battle it Out in Court – Again was originally published on Coupons in the News.

It’s already happened in Detroit, Phoenix, Tampa and Atlanta. If you live in Los Angeles, Portland or Boston, it’s now happened to you. And who knows where it might happen next?

Valassis, the publisher of the RedPlum coupon inserts, has stopped distributing its coupons in more major cities’ Sunday newspapers. And unlike the earlier removals, the latest efforts don’t all appear to be targeted at hotbeds of coupon insert diversion.

Los Angeles, for one, has long been a problem area when it comes to coupon insert thefts and sales. Many of the coupons and inserts sold online by “clipping services” are stolen from distribution facilities (and several people have been caught in the act of doing just that). Valassis has been tracking where those inserts are coming from, and cutting off the sellers’ suppliers by cutting off the newspapers that it believes aren’t doing enough to prevent inserts from being stolen.

So, using that logic, it makes sense that Valassis is removing its RedPlum inserts from Los Angeles-area newspapers, including the L.A. Times, the country’s fourth-largest newspaper by circulation. But what about Portland, where the Oregonian newspaper lost its RedPlum inserts last week? Or Boston, where the Sunday Globe informed readers that it has stopped carrying them effective yesterday? Those markets weren’t necessarily on insert publishers’ radar when it comes to stopping the sale of stolen coupons.

Valassis is being characteristically cagey about its reasoning. “Valassis continuously evaluates distribution channels by market based on many factors including security, reliability of delivery and retailer alignment and coverage,” Mary Broaddus, Valassis’ Director of Corporate Communications said in a statement to Coupons in the News. “Our priority of placing relevant promotions into the hands of consumers and meeting our clients’ needs in the market is unwavering.”

A desire to get more coupon inserts into more consumers’ hands was behind an earlier Valassis effort a decade ago, to remove inserts from newspapers with declining circulation and send them via mail instead. That effort was ultimately discontinued. But it was revived earlier this year, with a new rationale – to stop delivering inserts to markets whose coupons were showing up for sale online.

And now, this renewed effort appears to be something of a combination of both concepts. In some cases, it’s due to insert thefts – in others, it may simply be a marketing decision to shift delivery from newspapers to direct mail.

We don’t know for sure, because another difference between a decade ago and now, is that Valassis was very open about its actions back then, but is being closed-lipped about it today. When RedPlum inserts were removed from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution over the summer, Valassis wouldn’t say why – it was the AJC that admitted to Coupons in the News that “Valassis claimed to have tracked the origin of inserts that are being made available for sale, and have determined that they are coming from certain cities, so they’ve chosen to no longer make them available via the major newspapers in those cities.”

Representatives for the Boston Globe, the latest paper to lose its RedPlum inserts, did not respond to questions about why Valassis cut it off, and whether it was a mere marketing decision or a response to concerns about insert thefts.

Meanwhile, in another curious and possibly related recent development, two months after Atlanta lost its RedPlum inserts, a small-town newspaper about 40 miles away excitedly announced that it would begin carrying them. “RedPlum coupons are coming back to The Newnan Times-Herald!” the paper announced last weekend.

Could it be that as major cities lose their RedPlum inserts, smaller suburban papers surrounding those cities will start getting them instead? Valassis wouldn’t say, and the Newnan Times-Herald didn’t know. “I just received the order from Valassis and don’t know anything else,” the newspaper’s Sales and Marketing Director Colleen Mitchell told Coupons in the News. “They haven’t run in a very long time with us so we are just happy to have them back.”

One final thing that’s different today than a decade ago – the first time Valassis began moving RedPlum inserts from newspapers to direct mail, there was a huge outcry. Couponers complained loudly and called for boycotts, and their plight got national media attention.

This time? Not so much. Many couponers are disappointed, and some are saying the lack of easy access to RedPlum inserts will cause them to seek out the very insert sellers that Valassis is trying to thwart. But with couponing itself on the decline along with newspaper subscription rates, critics of the move are simply not as vocal as they once were.

And that may be just what Valassis needs, to carry out this latest initiative unimpeded. So don’t be surprised to see an ongoing drip, drip, drip of stories about more newspapers losing their RedPlum inserts in the weeks and months ahead. If it hasn’t happened in your city yet – it may be just a matter of time.

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The article RedPlum Inserts Disappear From More Sunday Newspapers was originally published on Coupons in the News.

Did you get a lot of holiday shopping done on Black Friday this year? Did you hold out for Cyber Monday deals to make your final few purchases?

Or are you like most other people, still scrambling to get gifts and cross names off your list?

Don’t fret if you missed out on some of the big Black Friday/Cyber Monday doorbusters this year. A new survey shows that holiday shoppers are still on the hunt for coupons and deals, so retailers had better keep providing them – otherwise, holiday shoppers will get their gifts somewhere else.

That insight comes from Valassis’ first-ever “Holiday Shopper Survey”. It found that 83% of holiday shoppers planned to do at least some of their shopping after Cyber Monday. 83% also said that deals help determine what items make it onto their gift lists, and 53% said coupons are the biggest influence on their holiday purchases.

Deals help shoppers decide not only what to buy, but where. This is particularly true among Moms and millennial parents. Nearly three-quarters of them say coupons and discounts influence their purchase decisions, 79% say coupons and discounts help determine what store they visit, and 80% say they will leave a store if they think they can get a better deal somewhere else.

And many of those deals, as “showroomers” are well aware, are online. 73% of Moms use deal websites to get the best bang for their buck, 67% consult emailed sales and promotions, and 56% say print ads encourage them to make a purchase online. And among millennial parents, nearly half do holiday shopping online while at work.

Still, the action isn’t all online. Physical stores are still in the game. According to a separate survey from Valassis-owned RetailMeNot, 87% of shoppers said they plan to visit a physical retail store at least once during the month of December.

“While the Black Friday through Cyber Monday weekend represents the most popular holiday shopping timeframe, consumers shop and save throughout the season,” Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle said in announcing the survey results. “The last stretch of the season offers brands and retailers an opportunity to influence purchasing decisions… with relevant deals.”

So if retailers are smart, they won’t deploy all of their best deals too early in the season. And if you’re a savvy shopper, you’ll know not to resign yourself to paying full price in the home stretch of the holiday shopping period. The deals and discounts are out there – and if you manage to find them, you may be the one who really has something to celebrate this holiday season.

Photo by Sister72

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The article Holiday Shoppers Demand Coupons and Deals was originally published on Coupons in the News.

Coupons in the News turned five this year, after publishing more than 1,600 unique and original news stories about the coupons you use and the stores in which you use them.

But that milestone was only one highlight this year – the world of couponing itself was busy as ever. So before you ring in the new year, we invite you to take a few moments to look at the top ten stories of 2017, and how they could affect the way you use coupons in the year to come:

10. Coupon fraudster pays a steep price
He was once a key player in a coupon industry he derided as a “lying, cheating, dirty business”. Today, he’s inmate #08784-089 at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center.

Following Chris Balsiger’s conviction late last year, the decade-long International Outsourcing Services saga officially came to an end in March of this year. That’s when the former coupon processing company CEO was sentenced to 10 years in prison, was ordered to pay $65 million in restitution to more than two dozen coupon-issuing manufacturers, and was penalized an additional $21 million.

Balsiger was found to have falsely submitted some $250 million worth of coupons to manufacturers for reimbursement that were never actually used by shoppers, keeping the cash for his company and himself.

Balsiger’s request for a retrial was denied in September, and now he’s pursuing an appeal. This long-running story appears to be over – but if Balsiger has his way, the epilogue hasn’t been written just yet.

9. Target’s Perks go poof
Proponents of digital coupons and promotions prefer them because they’re “fraud-proof”.

Try telling that to Target, which pulled the plug on its fraud-plagued Cartwheel Perks program over the summer. The program, introduced to limited areas back in 2015, was meant to be a fun way to reward loyal customers with free items through Target’s Cartwheel app. Instead, scammers figured out ways to reward themselves.

Some determined users spoofed their cell phone locations in order to gain access to the program, then signed up for multiple accounts and sold them on social media to others who wanted in. Others shared ways to misuse their reward coupons on items for which they were not intended. Still others took screen grabs of their bar codes and sold them to others who could scan them and get free stuff, without being Perks members at all.

Target has introduced a number of mobile innovations this year, merging its Cartwheel app into the main Target app, and adding a mobile payment capability. But it no longer has a loyalty program.

Target representatives took issue with the mere suggestion that the fraud had anything at all to do with its decision to end Cartwheel Perks. But if the program was wildly successful and impervious to fraud, it’s hard to imagine Target dumping it so unceremoniously.

Thanks, scammers.

8. The fight against coupon fairies
They fought the coupon company – and the coupon company won.

Two lawsuits initiated in 2016 were resolved this year, both resulting in serial printable coupon abusers being banned for life from Coupons.com.

Coupons.com owner Quotient Technology sued a couple of “coupon fairies”, both of whom had devised ways to bypass the website’s two-print limit to generate an unlimited number of unique coupon prints, which they then made available for sale online.

The defendants tried to put up a fight, arguing that they were just taking advantage of a vulnerability that Quotient was well aware of. Quotient, they said, should have spent more time shoring up its systems and less time trying to make an example out of two of the hundreds or thousands of coupon fairies doing the very same thing.

Ultimately, the fairies folded and chose not to see Quotient in court. Both agreed to permanent bans on printing any coupons from Coupons.com, and one was also ordered to pay Quotient $113,091 in damages, attorneys’ fees and costs.

In the meantime, Quotient has made some changes to its systems, and coupon fairies are not nearly as active as they once were – though you can still find printable coupons for sale online if you look for them. At least until the sellers find themselves the target of another lawsuit.

7. Coupon use is way down. Again.
Two years ago, coupon use hit a historic low point. Last year, it was even lower. This year, there were signs that by the time year-end figures are released next month, it could plummet even further.

Apparently we’re couponing like it’s 1975 again.

According to new figures released by Inmar this year, the coupon redemption rate reached its lowest point in more than four decades, for the second year in a row.

Part of it is likely due to that old standby complaint – coupons just aren’t as good as they used to be. But there are other theories. We’re buying more prepared foods and meal kits, and fewer products that offer coupons. We’re also doing more shopping at discount stores and online, where manufacturer’s coupons aren’t accepted.

Those trends don’t appear to be slowing down. So the days of “non-extreme couponing” may be here to stay.

6. Rebate apps reach their expiration date
If the first half of this decade was all about the rise of the rebate app, the second half of the decade has been about the survival of the fittest.

The alcohol rebate app bevRAGE folded this year. So did the grocery app Snapstar. Shopmium was discontinued, as its features were incorporated into the Coupons.com app. And no one’s really sure exactly what’s going on with Mobisave.

The world of cash-back apps seems to be coalescing around Ibotta, Checkout 51 and SavingStar, as the market leaders push out the pretenders. There are still other apps trying to make inroads, though, like Makeena, Fetch Rewards, and a yet-to-be-publicly-announced rebate app that’s set to make an “official” debut early in the new year.

There are only so many times most of us are willing to scan receipts, and only so many apps we’re willing to upload them to, before the whole process becomes cumbersome and just not worth the trouble. So the upstarts had better have something good to offer – otherwise, they may go the way of the others that found they just couldn’t compete.

5. No double-dipping – for real
You can still save a lot with the rebate apps that remain. But if you’re tired of uploading the same receipts to multiple apps in order to double up on rebate offers – a couple of apps want to save you that trouble.

Checkout 51 and SavingStar began working together this year, to prevent users who’d requested a rebate from one app, from receiving a rebate from the other app on the same purchase.

When rebate apps first came into being, they represented a potential bonanza of extra savings. Savvy shoppers were loving it, while brands were not, as super-savers could stack coupons with multiple rebate offers to get paid for shopping – and it was all perfectly legit.

Several apps began trying to put a stop to it, by forbidding the combination of rebate offers and coupons. But this year’s efforts by Checkout 51 and SavingStar represented the first cross-platform effort by competing apps to prevent you from combining rebates from multiple cash-back apps.

As with anything else, there are two sides to the coin – some argue that if brands don’t want shoppers to combine offers, then they shouldn’t offer overlapping discounts, and they have only themselves to blame if shoppers take full advantage of all the discounts that are available.

Ultimately, the brands that offer the deals and the platforms that allow you to access them, are the ones that make the rules. If you don’t redeem their offers in the manner they’d prefer – the cooperation between Checkout 51 and SavingStar shows that they may ensure you have no choice.

4. The death of double coupons
The slow demise of double coupons seems to make this list just about every year. So it’s a bit of an anticlimax – but worth noting nonetheless – that the country’s largest grocery chain officially killed off doubles for good this year. And other grocers are seeing their competitor’s move as an invitation to do the same.

Kroger discontinued double coupons in Texas way back in 2011. Over the next several years, it did away with doubles in other regions across the country, one by one, until the Nashville, Tennessee division represented the last set of Kroger stores to double coupons.

At least until February of this year, when Kroger discontinued doubles in Tennessee and officially got out of the business of doubling coupons for good. Along the way, various competitors followed Kroger’s lead and quit doubling coupons as well, including Publix in June of this year.

And since the cost of doubling coupons comes out of retailers’ own pockets, many couldn’t wait to say good riddance to the practice. But someone had to blink first – and once they did, that made it easier for others to follow suit.

As a marketing executive once said, many grocers are “sorry they are in double coupons” because once they start, “they can’t get themselves out of it.” It took six long years – but Kroger finally has.

3. Out with the old, in with the new
Lidl is in, Dollar Express and Marsh are out. Nearly 2,000 Rite Aid stores are turning into Walgreens, Whole Foods has turned into an Amazonian outpost, Target is “reimagining” itself, and we’re all finally warming to the idea of buying groceries online, more than a decade and a half after Webvan went bust.

Where and how we shop for groceries and household essentials changed quite a bit in 2017. Marsh, a Midwestern grocery chain with a storied history, folded. So did Dollar Express, which never even got a chance to open its first store. Rite Aid managed to survive, albeit at half its current size, after Walgreens abandoned plans to buy the whole chain and settled for buying half of its stores instead. And Lidl, in contrast, has opened plenty of stores since its U.S. launch in June, with plans to open many more – plans that may or may not pan out in the year ahead.

But the biggest development by far in the grocery industry this year was Amazon’s blockbuster purchase of Whole Foods Market over the summer. Other than some overhyped-in-retrospect promises of sharply lower prices, and the discontinuation of a barely-off-the-ground loyalty program, the new owners haven’t changed too much at Whole Foods just yet. But the purchase alone sent shock waves through the industry – putting all retailers on notice that it’s time to get on board with “omnichannel”, or get left behind.

Many grocery chains now offer buy-online-pick-up-in-store services, as well as grocery delivery through third parties like Instacart. Target, which was already in the process of revamping and “reimagining” its physical stores, stepped up its commitment to e-commerce by buying the delivery service Shipt just a few weeks ago.

Letting someone else do your grocery shopping is still a nonstarter to some of us. But a future in which that’s an everyday occurrence no longer seems quite so far-fetched.

2. Use a coupon or two – but no more
As the world’s largest consumer goods company, it stands to reason that Procter & Gamble offers some of the most popular coupons as well.

Too popular, in some cases. So the company has been taking rather extreme measures to make their coupons rather less appealing.

In July, all coupons in the P&G brandSAVER newspaper coupon insert began including the restriction “limit of 2 identical coupons per household per day”, down from the previous four. At the same time, P&G’s printable coupons began printing with the wording “Limit of 1 identical coupon per household per day”.

Limit one? Enjoy your 25-cent savings on that $12 pack of Charmin – and don’t spend it all in one place!

P&G’s stated goal was to discourage shelf-clearing. But there’s more to it than that. The company likely wants to make its paper coupons less attractive to buyers and sellers who peddle its coupons online. And P&G would prefer to steer paper coupon users to its more secure digital coupons, which also can be used just once on a single purchase.

That was the impetus behind a clumsy effort in May, when P&G replaced several popular coupons in many of its brandSAVER inserts with the infamous “NOT A COUPON” coupons. Instead of coupons for Tide, Gain, Downy, Unstopables, Bounce, Dreft and Olay, many recipients got something that looked kind of like a coupon but was labeled “NOT A COUPON” and directed them to look online for their actual coupons instead.

And that’s presuming you got a brandSAVER at all. Which brings us to this year’s top story…

1. The coupon insert disappearing act
Honest couponers have long said that coupon abusers are eventually going to ruin it for everyone. And this year, they just might have been proven right.

Tired of seeing their coupon inserts stolen from distribution centers and sold online, two of the three major insert publishers went with the nuclear option – they simply quit delivering their inserts to many major newspapers. If entire cities don’t get any inserts, there won’t be any to steal – simple as that!

No matter the motivation, the move represents a huge change in the coupon delivery system that’s been in place for more than 40 years. It was Valassis that invented the free-standing coupon insert back in the 1970’s, delivering grocery coupons to millions of homes by stuffing them into Sunday newspapers. And now, Valassis is the one leading the charge to remove them from many Sunday newspapers altogether.

Valassis publishes the RedPlum inserts and distributes P&G’s brandSAVER inserts. The companies’ joint effort to withhold their inserts from certain cities actually began prior to this year, but in only a couple of markets. In 2017, the initiative expanded to more major markets like Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Portland and Boston, where distributors’ coupon insert security measures were found to be lacking. Many of the large insert sellers and “coupon clipping services” get their coupons not by buying hundreds or thousands of copies of the Sunday paper, but by securing pallets of inserts directly from “insiders” at a distribution facility.

The third insert publisher, SmartSource owner News America Marketing, is stepping up its coupon security efforts as well. It launched a public relations campaign this year, to educate couponers about the likely source of the coupons they see for sale online. News America hasn’t said whether it might follow Valassis’ lead and start withdrawing its inserts from markets deemed to be problem areas. But it also hasn’t ruled it out.

If coupon insert thefts and sales aren’t stamped out in 2018, a weekly tradition that dates back to your mother’s or grandmother’s time – opening the Sunday paper to see what coupons to clip and use that week – could be in for a drastic change.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

So it was a busy 2017, and it’s shaping up to be an eventful 2018 already. Be sure you don’t miss any of it, by bookmarking this site, becoming a Facebook fan, following @couponinthenews on Twitter or subscribing to the daily email newsletter to ensure that you’re always plugged in to the latest news.

There wouldn’t be much point in writing about any of this, if there weren’t faithful fans out there reading it. So whether you drop in occasionally, or read regularly, thank you for your support throughout the year.

And as always, feel free to get in touch any time by emailing couponsinthenews@gmail.com with comments, questions, news tips or just to say hello!

All the best for the new year, and happy couponing!

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Don’t panic, but this weekend will be the last time you get a RedPlum coupon insert in your Sunday newspaper or mailbox.

The good news is, it’s not going away – it’s just getting a new name and a new look.

Beginning next Sunday, March 25th, RedPlum will be rebranded as “RetailMeNot Everyday”. It’s a display of corporate synergy between RedPlum publisher Valassis and the coupon code site RetailMeNot, which was acquired by Valassis parent company Harland Clarke Holdings last year.

(“it’s not out of the question that RedPlum might someday get absorbed into the better-known RetailMeNot brand,” Coupons in the News reported at the time of the RetailMeNot acquisition.)

“New name, new look, same great deals,” this weekend’s RedPlum inserts say in teasing next week’s transformation. But the company hopes the rebranding will prove to be more than just a face lift.

“We expect the coupon and offer content to expand over time,” Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle told Coupons in the News. The coupon insert publication schedule for the rest of the year will remain the same. But future inserts may include more non-grocery deals for restaurants and other local businesses, reflecting the type of content available on RetailMeNot.

Valassis will also retire the RedPlum.com website, relocating its printable coupons and other content to RetailMeNot.com/Everyday.

RetailMeNot is one of the best-known discount providers in the business, while RedPlum is not necessarily a household name among those who aren’t coupon devotees. So the RedPlum rebranding effort appears aimed at leveraging the better-known name, and bringing the different savings platforms under one banner.

“We are confident in the success of this new consumer brand and believe that its powerful name and refreshed appearance will bring significant value to clients as it is launched in the marketplace – providing a single, powerful savings destination,” Tingle said.

The RedPlum name was launched in 2008 for similar reasons – to unite the company’s coupon inserts, printable coupons and direct-mail offers under a single heading. “We’re everywhere,” the company said in unveiling the RedPlum branding a decade ago. “Consumers see one brand – RedPlum – appearing with great offers in the mail, newspaper, online and in-store.”

That didn’t stop the company from sending RedPlum into semi-retirement once before. A few years after launching the RetailMeNot-like coupon code site Save.com, Valassis tried retiring RedPlum.com and moving its printable coupon content to Save.com/coupons in 2013.

The key difference between now and then, though, is that rebranding RedPlum as RetailMeNot Everyday is meant to give RedPlum a more powerful and recognizable name, while rebranding it as Save.com/coupons was seen as a means to prop up a faltering web property with some sought-after printable coupon content.

That rebranding effort didn’t last – RedPlum.com was back up and running less than a year later.

This time, though, RedPlum’s name change may be for good. Just as long as Procter & Gamble has no objection, that is. P&G’s online coupon portal is named “P&G Everyday”. The company could claim there’s a likelihood of consumer confusion, having another coupon provider use a similar name in “RetailMeNot Everyday”, though it’s unclear if they would have a case.

But to Valassis and RetailMeNot, the key word in RedPlum’s name change to RetailMeNot Everyday is not “Everyday”, but “RetailMeNot”. “RetailMeNot is already top of mind in retail, and this partnership is another step in our continued mission to be the consumer’s ultimate savings resource,” RetailMeNot Chief Marketing Officer Marissa Tarleton said in a statement. “This convergence of digital and physical media is a natural next step in the RetailMeNot and Valassis partnership.”

And what might the next steps be after this? Retailer coupon codes in the Sunday inserts? Mobile grocery coupons on the RetailMeNot app? “We are exploring innovation ideas with RetailMeNot and will keep you apprised of new, exciting information moving forward!” Tingle promised.

So you can bid RedPlum a fond farewell this weekend. And after next weekend, hopefully you’ll be saying hello to some brand new ways to save.

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Much has been made of the increased adoption of online grocery shopping, and how the inability to use coupons and take advantage of in-store promotions is preventing some people from jumping aboard the online bandwagon. Now, a new report is offering new insights into those who don’t mind paying more in order to get their groceries online. And it reveals an interesting paradox.

It turns out online shoppers do want coupons and deals – but if they can’t find them, they’ll happily do without.

That’s according to Valassis’ newest annual Coupon Intelligence report. Each year, the report has a different theme – this year, the “2K18” edition is entitled “Modern Shoppers and Their Quest for Savings“, focusing on the various ways that today’s consumers shop, and save.

The main finding of the report is that people still like to use coupons. “The modern shopper is on a quest to save, with nearly all respondents reporting they use coupons,” the report finds. Among the shoppers surveyed, 94% said they use coupons at least some of the time, up from 90% last year. There are also significantly more shoppers who say they “always” use coupons – 15%, up from 10% two years ago.

While many have suggested that paper coupon use is on the way out, more shoppers say they’re using both paper and digital coupons. Digital may be growing in adoption, but paper coupons “remain a staple in the market and a critical tool that consumers use throughout their shopping experience,” the report finds.

Shoppers identified as “frequent coupon users” are among those who look to multiple sources to find coupons. These frequent couponers tend to be parents, homeowners and have a higher income than less-frequent couponers. They are “careful, habitual planners” who are “clearly motivated by a good deal.”

But higher-income shoppers are also more likely to shop for groceries online. And it’s more difficult to apply coupon savings to online purchases.

Online shoppers say they do use coupons when they can. But 70% of shoppers who primarily buy their food online “value convenience and saving time over saving money”, while just 26% of those who prefer to shop in stores say the same.

“These consumers are more likely to be motivated by convenience and a need to save time” – even when they do shop in a store. “For example,” the report finds, “more than half of online shoppers say they shop retailers such as dollar, drug and convenience stores because they can quickly find what they need.”

So they may be willing to spend more for the convenience of online shopping, and they’re okay with paying convenience store prices when they need to shop in person. But the report says marketers can still affect their purchase decisions. Capturing these consumers could be as easy as offering them some deals.

The report finds that online grocery shoppers will visit stores more often if they receive coupons they can use there. “Although convenience is paramount, online shoppers are still big seekers of value,” the report notes. In fact, only 3% of those who primarily buy their food online say they “never” use coupons, compared to 7% of all consumers. “This is especially of interest,” the report finds, because online shoppers are more likely to have higher incomes, “demonstrating that seeking value doesn’t stop with affluence”.

The report concludes by saying that “a multi-channel, cohesive approach is essential to engage and activate” today’s shopper. “This year’s report proves saving is still a top priority for consumers,” said Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle. “Marketers should keep in mind that today’s modern shopper is dynamic, constantly moving between online and offline channels as they plan, shop and save.” So providing various types of coupons and offers “is key to equipping consumers with the deals they want, at the right time and delivered how they prefer.”

It may be tempting for brands and retailers to sit back, watch and reap the benefits as online grocery shoppers happily pay full price. But that only works if those shoppers are buying their brands from their stores. Otherwise, coupons and discounts could be just what it takes to persuade these shoppers to change their purchasing decisions.

And if the inability to get good deals has been preventing you from buying more of your groceries online – here’s hoping brands and retailers heed that advice.

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When was the last time you went to your local shopping mall? When was the last time you could say you actually frequented the mall?

Sometime in the 1980’s, maybe?

Well, break out the big hair and acid-washed jeans, because malls are ready for a comeback. That’s according to a study by Valassis, which, among other things, publishes the RetailMeNot Everyday coupon inserts. So, not surprisingly, its study suggests that more savings, discounts and coupons could be just what it takes to make the mall a happening place again.

Valassis’ first challenge was finding 1,000 U.S. consumers who identified themselves as “regular mall shoppers”, defined as visiting an indoor mall more than three times in the past year.

Once survey-takers succeeded there, they discovered that mall shoppers aren’t retail Luddites stuck somewhere in a previous decade. They actually do a lot of their shopping online, but the number-one reason they prefer visiting a mall is to shop for clothes, with more than 60% saying they like to be able to try on and compare various options. 39% like having the ability to visit multiple stores and make several purchases in one location, while 24% consider a mall outing to be a social occasion.

But even these mall shoppers acknowledge the drawbacks. They say opting for online shopping over visiting the mall provides a greater range of product options, helps them to avoid crowds and large parking lots, and saves them from having to travel.

So what would encourage them to visit malls even more often?

Coupons!

59% said they would go to the mall more frequently if there were more opportunities for savings and discounts, far outpacing the second most-cited option of better parking accommodations, mentioned by just 20% of respondents. In fact, the top three things mall shoppers want to see more of, are “savings, coupons and deals”, “shorter lines and wait times” and “more access to in-store customer service reps”.

Malls “need to evolve to meet modern shoppers’ expectations,” said Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle. “Consumers want convenience, product options and incentives and all brick-and-mortar retailers, especially malls, need to understand their audience so they can provide an experience that makes visiting worthwhile.”

So if shoulder pads, jean jackets and “Full House” can come back, why not malls?

Some, however, aren’t convinced that malls can, or should, be saved. At an industry conference last month, former J.C. Penney CEO Mike Ullman predicted that 75% of existing malls will shut their doors over the next five years. That would leave just about 300 malls in the entire country. At that point, not even coupons and deals are likely to spark a comeback.

Shortly after his comments, Ullman was named the new CEO of Starbucks, which has hundreds of stores located in malls. So he has a vested interest in keeping malls alive – but he’s not optimistic.

Valassis, however, is. “If malls evolve, there would be strong appeal,” its report concludes. “Even amid doom and gloom, brick-and-mortar stores can influence those seeking a one-stop shopping destination with strategic updates and incentives.”

So keep an eye out for coupons and deals at your local mall. And if you don’t come across any – there’s a chance you may not have a local mall for long.

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It’s nearly the unofficial end of summer now that the Labor Day weekend is upon us, and it will be back to work and school for most of us after the holiday is over. But take heart, there will still be plenty to celebrate – because tomorrow begins “National Coupon Month”!

So how will you be celebrating? Clipping all the coupons that you get in the Sunday paper this weekend? Oh wait, there won’t be any. Printing coupons from home instead? Enjoy it now, because one coupon company says printable coupons are at death’s door. Searching for deals that can help you stock your pantry? Good luck, as coupons become ever more restrictive and hard to find.

Sounds like there’s not really a whole lot to celebrate. National Coupon Month has been pretty low-key in recent years anyway, but coupon publisher Valassis is once again marking the occasion by pointing out that shoppers still love deals, even though the way they take advantage of them is changing.

Valassis, the publisher of the RetailMeNot Everyday (formerly RedPlum) coupon inserts is out with the results of its annual Purse String Survey. And “the results show a fervent desire for coupons and deals,” Valassis proclaims.

Groceries remain the number-one category in which shoppers desire deals. 93% of respondents said they’re interested in coupons for food, with 68% citing restaurants. In fact, 29% said they won’t visit a restaurant at all unless they have a coupon or offer.

44% of shoppers said they print out coupons at home to redeem in-store – an eight percentage point drop from last year, lending some credence to the predictions of printable coupons’ demise (though whether it’s because manufacturers aren’t offering enough of them, or couponers are tiring of them, is still up for debate). 40% said they use mostly paper coupons, and 43% use print and digital coupons equally, suggesting that paper coupons are still alive and well.

Echoing the conclusions of its subsidiary NCH Marketing Services’ recent Mid-Year 2018 Coupon Trends Analysis, Valassis said its survey showed that offering coupons in a variety of formats is key. 81% of survey respondents said they “like brands to communicate coupons and offers in both print and online so I don’t miss savings”, and 60% said “seeing an offer in both print and online makes me more likely to make a purchase”.

There are more coupon options than just paper and digital, though. 32% of shoppers who use “virtual assistants” like Alexa or Google Assistant say they’re interested in receiving coupons and discounts via these devices, with that figure increasing to nearly half among Millennials.

But not everyone is interested in shopping via voice or shopping online. Of those who say they’re more likely to go to the store than shop online, 70% said they prefer to see or touch their items in person, 66% want to get their needed items immediately, and 65% say it’s because they’re able to use more coupons in store than they can online.

“Shoppers have more options of how, when and where to shop than ever before,” Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle said in a statement. “Understanding what consumers want ‘right now’ is crucial for a successful marketing campaign.”

So this National Coupon Month, there may be fewer coupons out there, but that’s apparently not for a lack of interest among shoppers. As long as that remains the case, with any luck, there will always be something for couponers to celebrate every September.

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Interest rates are going up, the stock market is volatile, consumer sentiment is shaky – so it’s a good thing we have coupons! Clipping coupons to save money could become even more important in the year ahead, so it’s a good idea to take stock of where we’ve been and where we’re heading.

In that spirit, it’s time for Coupons in the News’ seventh annual look back at the year in couponing. Whether you plan to offer 2018 a fond farewell, or wish it good riddance, this year was another eventful one that will affect the world of couponing in 2019 and beyond.

So out of the hundreds of stories that you read here on Coupons in the News this year (and you didn’t miss a one, did you??) here are the top ten that were the most memorable and most likely to have a lasting impact:

10. RedPlum gets a rebrand

Let’s be honest, “RetailMeNot Everyday” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue quite as easily as “RedPlum” did. But like it or not, the name appears to be here to stay, after Valassis retired its decade-old RedPlum brand this year in favor of something more suggestive of synergy.

The rebrand came a year after Valassis’ parent company acquired the online coupon code site RetailMeNot. In an effort to put all of the company’s couponing and savings content under one banner, RedPlum coupon inserts adopted their corporate cousin’s name in March, and RedPlum printable coupons later made the move to a section of the main RetailMeNot website.

Beyond just changing RedPlum’s name, Valassis spoke of having bigger plans. In print, “we expect the coupon and offer content to expand over time,” Valassis Chief Marketing Officer Curtis Tingle told Coupons in the News. And online, Valassis envisions having “dedicated brand pages” that feature coupons alongside brand messaging, broadening its offerings beyond the standard coupon gallery.

Old habits die hard, though. So enjoy the expanded content as it comes – but just remember not to call it RedPlum.

9. SavingStar is sold

The owner of Coupons.com bought another rebate app and forgot to tell anyone!

Ordinarily, an established brand like Coupons.com joining forces with an established brand like SavingStar might be big news. But Coupons.com owner Quotient Technology chose not to make a big deal out of it. The acquisition was completed in August, and Quotient made no public mention of it until November.

That’s because SavingStar isn’t what most would consider a major player anymore, and Quotient got it for a song. The $7.5 million purchase price, which could be upped if SavingStar meets certain financial targets, is less than half of what Quotient paid for Shopmium three years earlier.

While SavingStar has been around for longer than Ibotta and Checkout 51, it’s fallen behind those newer competitors. SavingStar also didn’t endear itself to users when it raised its cash-out threshold from an industry-low $5 to an industry-standard $20. And its new owner seems more interested in leveraging SavingStar’s brand loyalty capabilities and retail relationships, than it is making any big changes to the app itself.

Ultimately, the acquisition was a lifeline that allowed SavingStar to survive. What Quotient ultimately plans to do with it, remains to be seen.

8. Cash back or coupons? You decide!

Speaking of Ibotta and Checkout 51, the two apps entered into an unprecedented partnership this year that could be a game-changer – or an interesting experiment that doesn’t go anywhere.

The cash-back apps have teamed up with Kroger-owned digital coupon provider YouTech (which has since been acquired by Inmar) to make their offers available alongside YouTech’s digital coupon content. Visitors to Kroger-owned Fry’s, Ralphs and Smith’s websites or apps can clip digital coupons as they always do, then load cash-back offers onto their same store account.

Some of those cash-back offers are from Ibotta, some are from Checkout 51, some are store-specific, but all are available in one place. So users no longer have to visit multiple apps to access multiple forms of savings – and they no longer have to scan their receipts to get their rebates.

The benefit to YouTech and Kroger is having their digital coupon sites become one-stop shopping discount destinations. Ibotta and Checkout 51 get to expand their user base by reaching shoppers who may not use their apps. And by offering both forms of discounts in one place, brands get to ensure that overlapping offers can’t be stacked.

But will consumers be confused about why some discounts are immediate and some are deferred? Will seasoned cash-back app users balk at the anti-stacking controls? They’re good questions – and a good reason why the program is still considered a test.

7. “Couponing while black”?

Were they telling examples of racial animus, or two tempests in a teapot? Either way, a couple of incidents over the summer generated perhaps the most attention that couponing has gotten from mainstream media in quite a while.

In July, a Chicago woman recorded a viral video of a CVS manager calling police on her for trying to use a coupon that looked questionable, but turned out to be legit. Days later, a similar video went viral of a Dollar General manager calling police on a couponer in Buffalo, New York.

Both managers were white men. Both couponers were minority women. Both retailers swiftly fired the managers. And both incidents generated national media coverage, sparking spirited debates over whether the women were targeted because they’re minorities, because they’re women – or because they were causing trouble.

The incidents later inspired an episode of the TV show “What Would You Do?” in which a hidden camera captures bystanders’ reactions to staged situations. “An African American woman attempts to use a coupon but the cashier refuses to accept or scan it, thinking it’s fake,” the episode description read. “After the cashier calls the manager, the manager suggests that the customer leaves before he calls the police. What will other shoppers do?”

Many shoppers intervened, came to the customer’s defense and tried to defuse the situation. So at least the fictional version of the story had a happy ending.

6. Coupons lose their appeal

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before – coupon use has declined to a four-decade low.

This is the fourth year in a row that this very story has appeared on the year-end list of top stories. The total number of coupons redeemed fluctuates from year to year, typically rising during times of economic uncertainty, and declining during better times.

But this year, Inmar reported that 2.07 billion coupons were used in all of 2017, down more than 9% from the previous year, representing the fewest number of coupons used since 1975.

So what explains this precipitously steep decline? Many couponers complain that there are fewer coupons available for things they want to buy. Retail analysts say our shopping habits have simply changed, and coupons don’t always fit into the equation.

If the economy takes a serious turn in 2019, coupon use might actually start rising again – which could prove to be a steep price to pay, to reverse this particular trend.

5. Loyalty program shakeups shake up shoppers

Many stores offer ways you can save without coupons – but doing so became more difficult at several stores this year.

First, the Plenti loyalty program finally faded away, as the few remaining retail members of the coalition program bailed out. The idea was to allow you to earn and use loyalty points at whatever Plenti partner you chose. But members apparently weren’t all that interested, as the demise of the program earned more shrugs than sadness.

The reaction to some changes at Walmart and Walgreens was much less muted. Walgreens tweaked its Balance Rewards program, devaluing certain levels of rewards points that used to be worth more money off your purchase, and it lowered the maximum discount in a transaction from $50 to just $5. Shoppers who had been saving up points for big discounts were not happy.

Also unhappy were Walmart Savings Catcher users who don’t have a smartphone. Walmart changed its price-match program that used to be available online and accessible via a desktop, to make it only accessible through the Walmart app. And oh, by the way, it eliminated Savings Catcher altogether in certain regions.

Angry Walmart and Walgreens customers are threatening to do their shopping somewhere else. Unless their replacement stores change their own savings programs, that is. And then they just might be back.

4. “The demise of print-at-home coupons”

Hope you aren’t too attached to printable coupons, because the format “began to fade into the sunset” this year, according to a coupon industry leader. Inmar CEO David Mounts made that declaration, just a few months before pulling the plug on the Inmar-owned Hopster printable coupon site, calling printable coupons “a dying tactic”.

So was it a prescient prediction, or sour grapes from a company whose printable coupon site never really took off?

Printable use is indeed down, as compared with emerging formats like digital paperless coupons. But Qples didn’t agree that printables are doomed, when it acquired the Grocery Coupon Network and beefed up the site’s printable coupon collection. RevTrax gave up on its SaveInStore printable site, but now provides printable coupons for Savings.com in Its place.

And don’t tell print-at-home pioneer Coupons.com that printable coupons are dead.

They’re declining, to be sure, as more shoppers opt for the convenience of digital coupons. But there are still more printable coupons redeemed than tearpad coupons and peelies, and those formats aren’t going anywhere. So printables may still have some life in them – unless industry predictions of their imminent demise become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. A crisis for Catalina

Catalina Marketing is best known for its 35-year-old business of printing coupons at retailer checkouts, tied to shoppers’ purchases. But it would rather be known for something – anything – a little more high-tech and innovative.

That clash of the old and the new is part of what caused Catalina to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection just this month. In papers filed with the court, the company cites “an industrywide shift to digital” which is “disrupting Catalina’s traditional business model.”

As Catalina tries to come up with the best way to adapt to a digital future, its legacy business is also suffering. Over the past year, the company says the total number of stores that carry its Catalina coupon machines has declined by 7%, largely due to the “departure of a large retail partner” – presumably Target, which ended its relationship with Catalina around this time last year.

The company’s bankruptcy filing also says “aging infrastructure” is holding it back. Its current financial condition is such that it cannot “carry out the wholesale upgrades necessary” to its “legacy hardware and software platforms”.

Catalina hopes to emerge from bankruptcy with the financial flexibility to make some much-needed changes to its business. If it doesn’t, you may not get coupons when checking out for much longer.

2. Stores crack down on extreme couponers

Remember when you could go to the store, buy as many items as you wanted with as many coupons as you wanted, and no one batted an eye?

Most stores’ coupon policies are a lot more restrictive now – and this year, some got even more so.

Dollar General was long considered notorious for allegedly looking the other way as shoppers misused coupons or cleared shelves. But not anymore. Late last year, the retailer began instructing stores to verify that coupons are being used properly. And this year, it revised its coupon policy for the first time in years, imposing a new limit of five like coupons.

That’s not unlike other stores’ policies. But that’s why many who use, and some who abuse, coupons preferred Dollar General – because its policies were unlike other stores’.

Dollar General’s new limit is nothing like Meijer’s, though. Meijer this year imposed perhaps the most restrictive coupon policy ever seen – limiting shoppers to just two like coupons. Could it be only a matter of time before some store goes to a limit of just one?

1. Use one, and you’re done

A few brands aren’t waiting around for some retailer to introduce a one-like coupon limit. They’re taking matters into their own hands.

It was just a few years ago when some coupons stated that you could only use four in a single shopping trip. Then some went to two. This year’s trend has been to reduce the limit to just one. It started with Henkel, then L’Oreal, then Procter & Gamble.

P&G even updated the wording on its printable coupons. Not only can you only use one, but you have to act fast – the coupons expire 24 hours after you print them.

If the economy does sour in the near future and interest in couponing perks up, limits like these will ensure that we never see the type of extreme couponing we saw earlier this decade. And that may turn out to be 2018’s most lasting legacy.

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So those are the highlights from a busy year in couponing. What will 2019 bring? Be sure to keep up with Coupons in the News so you will be one of the first to know! If you haven’t already, consider bookmarking the site, becoming a Facebook fan, following @couponinthenews on Twitter or subscribing to the daily emailed newsletter.

Thank you for your readership, support, comments and tips. And feel free to get in touch any time by emailing couponsinthenews@gmail.com. Happy New Year and see you with more coupon news in 2019!

Photo by rose3694

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