A History of Coupons: From a Pen to an iPhone and Everywhere Inbetween

It started in 1894. An Atlanta businessman ­_­used handwritten tickets for a free glass of Coca-Cola to market his new soft drink. This was the birth of what we now know today as coupons. Coca-Cola was in every state within two decades and every 1 in 9 Americans had received a free Coca-Cola soft drink. Last time I checked Coca-Cola is doing pretty good in the recognition category right?

C.W. Post, 1 year later, started using coupons to sell groceries. The coupon was a one-cent discount on his new breakfast cereal called Grape Nuts. Throughout the 30’s and 40’s, coupons had grown from a small grocery store fad to a tradition that even chain supermarkets(then just starting to become popular) were following.

By 1965, half of all American households were clipping coupons. Fast forward even further to the 1990’s and you will find the birth of printable coupons. The 90’s were also a time where 83% of all Americans used coupons. Not to be outdone, the new millennium was the first to invent online coupons. Internet retailers used coupons in the form of “codes.” Otherwise known as promo codes, promotion codes, shopping codes, source codes, ect. They were enormously effective. In 2006 “free shipping” was one of the most popular coupon codes used. Free shipping is one of the largest determinants of where people shop online. I know I’m certainly guilty of scouring coupon-code websites to find “free shipping,” or “10% off order” coupons.

Needless to say, coupons have proved to be an excellent marketing tool. On March 10^th, 2010 coupons have taken another form. Target launched the first ever scannable mobile coupon program. Consumers can opt-in to the program on their computer by going to Target.com/mobile, on their phone at m.target.com or by texting COUPONS to 827438. Once in the program customers receive a link to a mobile web-page with several offers, all of which are accessible through a single bar-code.

The target of the campaign is not overtly obvious. So I’m going to guess…. here it goes. The target market is tech savvy. They know how to find online coupons, but would prefer to go shopping at a physical location for products that Target stores offer. There is a time and place to shop online, when they go shopping at Target it’s for a quick trip. The target market likes a sense of immediacy as they cannot wait to check their email until they get home; hence they have an iPhone/Blackberry.

It’s not laziness that prevents this target market from coupon hunting, it’s time constraints. So the solution is this mobile coupon program. What’s better than a store that you inevitably go to now and again sending you coupons? It does take the target markets initiative to sign up for the program, so the annoyance factor is out the window; they literally asked to be texted.

Target has stated in their press release from the 10^th of March “Target is committed to providing a fun and convenient shopping experience with access to unique and highly differentiated products at affordable prices.” In measuring their effectiveness, I would say they get high marks. This is clearly an innovation that nobody else can lay claim to as of yet. Coupons have been a proven success, from the early days of Coca-Cola and C.W. Post with his Grape Nuts cereal, to online promotions codes and now mobile coupons. Target is taking convenient shopping to the next level by coupling it with convenient discounts. I have yet to find anybody that hates discounts, so this program looks like a win-win to me.

The Bit Torrent Saga

Copyright Infringement is literally undergoing a new chapter. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) have new reason to be very upset. This is such a new issue for copyright infringement that it has yet to even surface in our textbooks. Legal Environment of Business did teach about the monumental Napster case in regards to online music file sharing, but the new issue is Bit Torrents.

If you haven’t heard of Bit Torrent yet, I truly feel bad for you. It’s the fastest way to download peer-to-peer files on the Internet. The limits of my iTunes and movie collection are endless. So naturally I stumbled upon one of the largest bit torrent search engines and have been coming back ever since. Their name is Isohunt, and along with The Pirate Bay and Mininova, they make up the three largest search engines for .torrent files. Mininova at one time was even number 51 of all websites for most trafficked.

As of late only Mininova and The Pirate Bay have been decimated by court rulings. For starters Mininova’s founders have been sentenced to jail for hosting copyrighted material. The Pirate Bay has been going through legal battles in Italy, bouncing between the Court of Bergamo, the Supreme Court, and back to the Court of Bergamo to battle a complete censorship of their site in Italy. The decision was made in the Supreme Court where they ruled, according to the verdict, “Bit Torrent sites that host torrent files are playing a significant role in the downloading and uploading process of their users. By doing so they are more than an agnostic search engine such as Google.” The Pirate Bay will be going back to the Court of Bergamo to combat the decision.

Now this brings me to Isohunt, who is a website based out of Vancouver Canada. Canada has notoriously been a safe haven for file sharing. It’s important to note that Canada has never sued someone for distribution let alone downloading. So naturally they are a friendlier place than Sweden when it comes to P2P sharing, as Sweden is the country to lock up The Pirate Bay founders.

The IIPA are the combination of MPAA, RIAA, BSA, and they have notoriously been on the case of China, Canada, and Russia for their lack of modernization in regard to copyright protection. Essentially the IIPA is in place to secure the entertainment industries interest. It seems that China, Canada, and Russia have subscribed to the “wait and see” method, where as the United States has taken file sharing head on.

Now onto the case, Isohunt is currently being sued by Columbia Pictures Industries for a permanent injunction. The ruling in favor of Columbia Pictures has been widely reported on. What has not been talked about is the countersuit by Isohunt to oppose the permanent injunction. Lead by Gary Fung, the arguments against Columbia to me seem to be very strong.

The facts of the case are as follows. The basics of the website are the same as that of the likes of Yahoo and Google. At their core is a SIS system, which is the ever-changing, basic technical design for search engines. Google, Yahoo and Isohunt all have the same goal: to organize and help users locate information worldwide. To prove their similarities, Mr. Fung conducted a test of 5000 torrent searches on both Isohunt, and then a search on Yahoo as well as Google. He found that 95% (4721 of 5000 searches) of the torrents that were indexed were equally available on the main sites as they were available on Isohunt.

Isohunt does not discriminate what is indexed and what is not, “nor does it make available links to possibly copyright infringing content any more than what is already available on the Internet in aggregate as a whole.” Essentially Isohunt reflects the state of the Internet as a whole, just like Google and Yahoo do.

Isohunt also is not guilty of providing a service to download the copyrighted material either. There is nothing about the sites or services that provided a software mechanism for copying. Once the material is downloaded the connection with Isohunt is lost. So it is apparent that the service Isohunt provides is a search for material, both within and outside the legality of copyright. So the question now is who is responsible? Is the user who uploads the copyrighted material to the site that Isohunt links to responsible? Is the website responsible for monitoring copyrighted material?

If the courts assert that Isohunt is guilty of being a more than agnostic search engine, as they did in Italy with The Pirate Bay, isn’t Google and Yahoo guilty as well. If their sites provide 95% of what Columbia deems as lawsuit worthy, why isn’t Google in court? This is an ever-changing legal picture that is still shaping today. So naturally I don’t have the answer as a senior in college, however I’m free to guess. And my guess is because nobody, and I mean nobody, as the audacity or gumption to sue the most popular website on the planet. Google provides users the ability to find information, just as Isohunt does. But should Isohunt become a victim for merely focusing their search on just .torrent files? The MPAA and RIAA are in for some headaches, and until they can successfully shut down the dissemination of sharing digital material.. share away my friends.

NikeID vs. Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ

Finally some interactive websites that I find interesting! Interactive sites have been a huge part of marketing on the internet. From micro-sites to interactive "create-your-own" sites, marketers have been employing interactivity online for quite some time now. That is not to say that every interactive sites is effective. Most of them are screaming for attention in such an annoying manner that it has been easy for me to ignore them for most of my internet life. The petty games and incessant cramming of information down your throat is enough to keep anybody away in my opinion.

Yet it seems that NikeID and Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ have found ways to shake my grudge against companies interactive sites. I'm not sure if it was the high tech feel to it or the unlimited options, but I killed quite a bit of time creating multiple shoes on both sites.

I have been aware of Nike ID since I was in middle school. Clearly they have expanded the idea since then, buy my past experience with NikeID was only customizing soccer cleats. I do remember basketball and baseball shoes also having a customizable capability, but the options were limited. It made much more sense to buy a shoe that was already "hot" per say, than try to make a "better" shoe with not so many options.

I can't say the same today, that's for sure. First of all, even the choice of what shoe to customize too a while for me. You can customize nearly any shoe they sell. Not only that, but you can even chose a blank slate, or work off a shoe that you already might like. Have you ever seen a shoe before and thought to yourself, "if only this color was different and I would love this." Well problem solved! NikeID gives you an almost unlimited number of combinations to choose from to the point where if 200 people were asked to make shoes, I don't think a single pair would be identical.

Puma also has taken customization to a great place. I was not aware of Pumas customization capability at all until this assignment. I was always fairly certain that you could customize Nikes. Anyway Puma went a step further and branded per say the customization shop. You are now in the Mongolian Shoe BBQ (whatever that means). But once you get over the lame name, your shot into some basic info questions. Male/Female, shoe size, and your on your way to custom Puma heaven. Puma asks which of the four stock shoes you would like to customize, then if you would prefer a blank shoe, or an already conceptualized design.

If you put a gun to my head and asked which site is better, I would say Nike. But both sites have great things going here. They are both very high tech and modern looking. The graphics and sweeping interactivity keep you interested for quite some time. But the nod goes to Nike if you asked me which site has more shoe model options. Keeping that in mind, and also calculating in that I prefer Nike to Puma anyway, and you have the explanation for my choice.

That's not to say I'm not a fan of Puma. If you don't know the story behind Puma and Adidas you really should. It's a sneaker fairy-tale. Puma really put some effort to making their website fool proof. Making a sneaker really isn't brain surgery. Although I think Nike also gets the nod for making it just a bit easier. Where you have to read and scroll to get to the appropriate part of the shoe with Puma, you simply click on that part of the shoe with Nike's website. It made making a shoe like this below a breeze.


Check out the
Nike 6.0 Mavrk Mid 2 iD Shoe
I designed at NIKEiD.com

And if it wasn't completely clear that I'm giving the victory to Nike, they took it one step further to make my analysis that much easier. There is a rectangular color scale at the bottom left of the main NikeID page. Simply click on the color you think would look good, and the website will generate nearly 25 shoes with the color scheme you clicked on. You can even use them simply to "start" and customize from there. So even for people with creativity that was left for dead in a poorly completed coloring book from elementary school don't have an excuse to be bad at creating a shoe. If you really can't think of anything, just have fun clicking on the rectangle until you see something that catches your eye. It's really that easy

For anyone that doesn't mind dropping 100+ on casual shoes, these two sites are a must visit. Being unique and individual is a large part of buying shoes for most people, so both companies are presenting an amazing platform to let your imagination run wild for a not so impossible price tag.