This is just getting ridiculous.
Seemingly every publisher (NYT) or distributor (Bing, Google, facebook) are getting into the group buying market (dare we say craze?). Our decision to move the traditional five year outlook for our paper down to two ("How should Groupon innovate to effectively compete in the group buying ecosystem in 2013?") seems like an eternity from now.
The greatest threat in the short term is buyer fatigue from all these deals. Hardcore users can buy only so many luxury products like massages and dining out coupons. For the masses, moving away from the "one deal per day" paradigm could decrease the excitement factor of the daily email. Interestingly, Groupon's next ad campaign will focus on adding fun and excitement to your week.
With the competition increasing by the day, we came up with the following abstract for our project: Within the $130 billion dollar local advertising market, Groupon has helped define the group buying model as a new means or promotional ad spending. The quick emergence of dozens of clones and potential for entry to this market by large traditional and digital media advertising organizations means that Groupon must extend beyond their current advantages in sales force size and brand image and broaden the scope of their platform and capabilities of their service for businesses and/or customers.
Stay tuned for our ideas for what features we believe Groupon need to add to their current email-based system. What do you think?
The key is going to be differentiation. First mover advantage is not enough for a true competitive edge in this field, since many buyers move from site to site in search of the next deal. And buyer fatigue is right! It seems like every day there is a new website out there that is promising the same thing... and the names are all so similar...
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