Interesting... Regardless of Groupon itself, I saw this Ad quite differently... more as a poke at vacuous Americans who are more concerned with consumer products and bargains than real world issues. I'm obviously in the minority here tho!But was it laughing at them or with them? It seemed more of an "with them" kind of joke to me, since they want their money.
Groupon just needs to change their slogan to "We turned down $6 billion, bitches."Heh.
"$6 billion isn't cool, you know what's cool?"
"What?"
"Blowing up your brand at the superbowl, right after your sell half your shares on the private market pre-IPO"You reckon that the great time a lot of us had today watching the game makes us all conservative villains?Funny.
posted by EatTheWeak at 4:09 AM on February 7 [+] [!]
I love these ads because I scripted an advertisement for Coca-Cola last Monday that seems to follow the exact same line of thinking. Mine was using the Egypt protests and ended with the tagline "Give people what they want", but it was following the same idea, namely, "You would have to be UNCARING and SHALLOW to care about buying things considering how terrible the world is, but while you're here anyway want to buy some things?"Wow. Also, Everyone knows Arabs drink Pepsi.
* Expires 10:32 AM February 7, 20011. Limit 1 per person, may buy 1 additional as a gift. No cash back. Tax not included. Not valid with other offers. See the rules that apply to all deals.The deal is good for 18,000 years? Wow.
A local spa puts up a Spa Package that normally is 150 bucks for 75 bucks. Groupon takes 30%. They sold 550 of them. Groupon gets about 12 grand off of that, immediately.Yeah, but in what sense groupon do $12k worth of work here? They're ripping off business owners. It works well for services that would just have downtime if people weren't coming at lower cost (Market segmentation!) But for restaurants and other business with per-unit costs it's a bad deal.
After factoring in cost-of-goods sold including labor, the margin on that, even if every single person cashed in, was about $13,000.00. Yup. 13 grand. If any of the 550 don't cash in, that goes up. And many of those customers, if they receive good service, will come back.
Not to doubt you, but your numbers mean that the spa's cost for a package that they normally sell for $150 is under thirty bucks, meaning their usual gross profit margin is about 80%. That seems... unlikely.Likely the had a lot of downtime, and the people who came in subsidized the empty timeslots. Selling more doesn't increase their fixed costs. OTOH if they were operating at capacity, there would be no reason to use groupon.
This is rather late to the thread, but Shanghaiist has an interesting take on how the ad will affect Groupon's planned expansion into China here and here.Lol. That was the other thing that struck me as odd -- I remember thinking, "It's a good thing google didn't buy them, with all the trouble they're *already* having with China". I had no idea they were interested in that market.
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posted by mr_roboto at 8:50 PM on February 6, 2011