Pathmark is a supermarket chain inside the New York metropolitan place that prints out grocery coupons according to customer purchases at the checkout.
It’s ingenious marketing, though at first glance it would seem to go against the grain where conventional thinking is concerned.
That’s due to the fact traditionally grocery coupons have been utilized to get consumers to try out new products, not merely get them to pay for more of what they clearly already have an interest in as judged by shopping cart contents!
Yet what Pathmark appears to be doing by providing coupons for items already bought is actually two-fold: to help foster brand loyalty through monetary incentives and to better measure the correct pricing ranges at which products sell best.
The latter purpose is traditional marketing, and one of the causes behind grocery coupons to begin with.
The former goal, however, is rather novel – again, considering that the product has already been bought.
But it’s a great idea, certainly not costing the company much money (the money saved is always less than two dollars, and quite often considerably so).
A certain mentality can set in when one looks forward to saving money on a specific brand, with each purchase causing another issuance of money-saving coupons on further purchases.
What Pathmark is apparently doing, really, is providing coupons the first two or three times, then more infrequently until finally the consumer is presumed hooked, which brings us back to measuring optimum pricing amounts.
Tabulating and analyzing the outcomes of many, many consumers, looking at information such as the number of coupons redeemed versus the number issued and at what prices points, a picture should come through of what the market would aid at which price points.
Of course, the case could also be much less complicated.
In keeping with another tradition, these coupons could have been created simply to move overstock!
