Paying retail is so last century.
Now that customers have instant and infinite access to flash buying, social shopping, online couponing, special incentives, daily deals, free shipping, loyalty programs, promo codes, online auctions, digital classifieds and hyperlocal discounts, there’s no reason not to find every advantage, and take it. And companies can grumble all they want about the customer expectation of collective bargaining, but if they really wanted to blow customers away, if they really wanted to leverage this trend, they would reverse their trajectory. They would befriend the current. What if your company launched an application that was an aggregator for codes, discounts and coupons of its own products? Imagine a platform, branded by the company itself, which curated, in real time, all the savings offers from the web, then arranged it as a search engine to help customers never pay retail again. The website could be promoted as a digital love letter, a secret menu, a remarkable pricing strategy, to be personally delivered to your best customers as a massive thank you for their business. They’re already not paying retail anyway. Why not beat them to the punch? That’s something worth talking about. When you meet the closed heart of the world with kindness, when you create an act of generosity in a moment of scarcity, customers can’t resist.
