Mike Blumenthal pointed out yesterday that Google has renamed Coupons “Offers” in its Places dashboard. This is likely part of a larger move to revamp coupons on Google more generally. The company not long ago invested in a self-service deals site, Signpost. And Google is also quite conscious of the success of daily deals and coupons more generally.
Google could have “owned” the coupon space. It clearly doesn’t.
But why has Google so badly blown the coupons/deals opportunity is my question? I think the answer lies in the fact that the company neglected to develop a meaningful consumer experience around coupons. It still can, however — and I’m sure is planning to. Yet Ask tried to aggregate coupons (etc) with Ask Deals and I suspect that hasn’t been as successful as hoped.
Until there is a meaningful consumer experience around deals/coupons on Google (online and/or in mobile) it’s unlikely that it’s going to be able to sell SMBs on coupon creation.
Related: What Is “Google Offers”?
November 16th, 2010 at 11:54 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Greg Sterling, Posts Google and shoppetweets, SMBinfo. SMBinfo said: Why Has Google Failed on Coupons? http://ow.ly/19ZXJT [...]
November 16th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Greg, in my opinion the reason Google isn’t as successful in many categories as one would expect (ex. coupons) is simply a matter of branding and positioning.
The Google brand essentially represents ‘search’. They are fortunate that search is at the top of the funnel for coupons, offers, shopping, and pretty much everything else, but it makes it hard to capture the mindshare of both businesses and consumers for non-search offerings.
Toss the whole ‘local’ angle on top and it’s one more market segment to capture.
It’s scary for those of us in the information/transaction space who have to compete with Google’s growing monopoly, but at the end of the day, they don’t reach the adoption levels expected because of a limited ability to associate their brand with the various markets they play in.
For people who aren’t totally focused on the space like you, me and the rest of your readers, Google’s offerings are either confusing or unknown – it would be difficult for Google to undertake the sustained, focused marketing necessary to really dominate a vertical, market or feature, which is why they rarely live up to expectations.
Gmail is one of the more successful Google offerings due to its separate brand. I think this is why Google is now launching boutiques.com and other brands.
As they start to launch directly competing companies (boutiques.com will now be perceived as a company, not a ‘feature’), they will subject themselves to increasing accusations of monopolization of the market along with its ramifications.
It’ll be much harder for them to promote a separate brand/company into a preferred position (ex. boutiques vs. Google shopping) without creating this perception.
If Google really ‘got it’ (I think they suffer from an extreme case of myopia), they would stick to search, kick some serious ass (even more than they do already), and leave everything else to others. That is how they will build a 50-100 year business that people (both consumers AND merchants/partners) love.
At the rate they’re entering new markets and promoting their internal content over third-party content – doing just enough damage to piss people off, but not enough legwork to dominate, they are going to face a backlash and subject themselves to increasing scrutiny that will make it difficult to innovate at the pace they have been.
Anyway, those are just my $0.02. Thanks for asking the question.
November 16th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Colin:
I don’t necessarily think the problem is the brand; I think it’s execution in many cases. Re “expansion” . . . I don’t think Google can help itself (20% time and all that). Plus being a public company means you need to constantly tell a growth story to investors.
I think the internal culture and external pressure conspire against your recommendation of just doing search really well. If Google does expand too far it will eventually be sued as a monopoly, just as MSFT was.
November 16th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
[...] Yahoo aspires to be the central deals/offers destination online. Ask.com tried and largely did not succeed. Google has always had the chance be a major coupon source/site but has failed to capitalize on that opportunity. [...]
November 16th, 2010 at 6:53 pm
It think Google has missed it on coupons/deals for the same reason Google is not a player in classified, auctions, real estate, travel, entertainment, reviews, et. al., — the underlying data set is not the near-infinite problem of indexing and making searchable large distributed datasets — it’s not a technology or developer problem for them to overwhelmingly dominate then monetize, or something consumers expect as part of the fabric of basic search.
Crisp execution (to your point) on thinking like a publisher: how something is packaged, branded and marketed to consumers; how you play in the business ecosystem at large (partnerships); even how you grow a consumer (not developer) community — maybe not current Google strengths.
November 24th, 2010 at 10:02 am
[...] surely Google coupons Offers are working their way toward the surface of Google. As Greg Sterling points out, this is one market that Google had an early start in but never capitalized on. Offers are now [...]
November 24th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
[...] surely Google coupons Offers are working their way toward the surface of Google. As Greg Sterling points out, this is one market that Google had an early start in but never capitalized on. Offers are now [...]
November 29th, 2010 at 11:27 am
[...] that Google effectively has no meaningful coupons/deals play, although the company is thinking very hard about the segment. Recall also how focused now Google [...]