Have you ever seen a Bed Bath & Beyond ad on TV? In a magazine? On the web? I haven’t. Yet they have the biggest brand recognition in the space and enjoy industry leading customer loyalty. How do they do it?
Instead of giving their marketing budget to NBC or Martha Stewart, they give it to their customers. Every week in the mail they send a coupon for $5 off or 20% off any item. I went in with my wife a few weeks ago to by a new set of pots and pans. BB&B had what we wanted on sale. They also had an offer of a $50 gift card if you spent over $500. And we got 20% off the entire deal from the coupon. As we were checking out (with a $100+ in other merchandise that we happened to pick up) I giddily said to the guy working the register “Add in the $50 gift card and you guys paid me over $100 to buy these pans. How can you afford to do that?”
And he said: “Have you ever seen a Bed Bath & Beyond advertisement? We’d rather pay you. Have a great day.”
[Admin note: Sorry for the unexpected silence over the past week.]
4 comments ↓
Uh yeah, those BB&B mailers are Adverting. We call direct mail, a very common form of advertising. Yes, there are lots of people in that make it possible. So, yes I have seen a bb&b ad, I get them in the mail. So what is your point?
and before I forget. BB&B spends millions of $ a year and probably employs 10 -15 (maybe more) people to make sure ya’all get your coupons. There is work to be done to get it to you (creative, printing, mailing) and costs (paper, postage). They can’t just leave piles of them on the street.
These coupons are an incentive to get you into the store so you can spend more money there. That’s it, and it works, if it didn’t the coupons would, not so, magically disappear.
So while you may not see Bed Bath & Beyond ads on TV, they still advertise.
straight point Jonas. And on the overarching theme of advertisers paying us the money…have you ever stopped to calculate how much money that would amount to in a year per person? Its like a class action lawsuit where one party gets 28 million and the other gets $17.31. the question is not how can they pay you….they can already do that many ways they dont cause it just doesn’t make a lot of sense once you get to the end of thinking it all the way thru….the answer your looking for us “What will motivate the consumer to take action”.
jb, marketers spend $300 billion per year to get their message in front of US consumers. And there are roughly 300 million americans. So it works out to an average of $1,000 spent per person per year and of course, not all people are demanded equally.
Jonas, you are right. Direct mailing coupons is a form of advertising. My point was that they are bucking the status quo, and not giving the lion share of their marketing budget to middle men. They are giving it to consumers and combining it with excellent service policies to build loyalty with consumers rather than media companies.
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