More Consumers Use Coupons – A Clip-And-Save Renaissance

PR Log (Press Release) – Oct 28, 2009 – More Consumers Use Coupons – A Clip-And-Save Renaissance

Published: September 24, 2009   by Stephanie Rosenbloom

It may be the digital age, but when it comes to pinching pennies, most consumers are opting for a method that is well over a 100 years old: the paper coupon. Thanks to the miserable economy, coupons — like board games and family dinners around the kitchen table — have made a comeback. The recession has even made coupon clippers out of some groups that once avoided them, including well-to-do shoppers and young shoppers.

“Coupons were not in vogue during our period of gluttonous consumption,” said Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist in San Francisco “But now that it’s once again cool to be cheap, they’re back.”

In the first half of this year, coupon redemption climbed 23 percent. Some 1.6 billion coupons were redeemed, leading Inmar, a coupon-processing company to forecast that more than three billion coupons will be redeemed this year.

More of them are being redeemed by consumers who have long avoided coupons.

Coupon use among another group — affluent consumers born in the late 1950s and 1960s — rose 13 percent in January and February, compared with the same months in the previous year. Data from Nielsen published last month underscored this trend, showing that households earning $70,000 or more a year were among the top coupon users.

Matthew Tilley, director of marketing for Inmar, said that coupon use was growing most among such groups and that they were the ones driving traffic to Web sites with printable coupons. Redemption of printable coupons, which span the divide between old-fashioned paper coupons and newer digital versions, grew 308 percent in the first half of this year, from a small base.

“I believe it’s not coincidental that the spike in coupon redemption began just as some of the worst economic news hit the front pages,” Mr. Tilley said, adding that coupon-cutting is but one more way consumers are changing their habits. “Folks are going back to the basics,” he said, “trying to live simpler lives.”

Digital coupon use on the Web, is also growing. In the first half of this year about 10 million digital coupons were redeemed, up 25 percent compared with the period a year earlier, according to Inmar.