Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Most rebates seem to run in the order of 1%. For example, if you look at miles from Airline programs the value ends up being around 1%. I am assuming the "CPG's pay us $2.00 per unit sold and we rebate $1.00 of that amount back to shoppers." was just an example, and that the CPG wouldn't have to pay you $2 for every sale no matter how large or small? But that the CPG pays x amount and half of that amount is rebated to the end user?

One large challenge will be to both sign up retailers/manufacturers and end users. Consumers will sign up as they want the rebate. But you didn't say what is in it for the CPG? The assumption is that the CPG would get more business out of this, justifying the cost. You will need to state that explicitly. Better yet, talk about how this brings in new business for them (not just cannibalizing old business, now at a discounted price).

Is the retailer involved? How does the tracking of a sale of the specific product and paying out of the rebate work? Have you put in place all of that logistics? If it is involves a store, do you have a way to make sure they want to do this (e.g. they get some sort of financial cut to give an incentive to do this)?

Quick reaction: I suspect most consumers will find the process too much trouble and not worth it for $10. Of course this is easily tested.

CPG marketers will need some "proof" that this kind of promotion will generate a positive ROMI for them. Many don't want to offer price-oriented promotion incentives, and this won't be of interest. Others will want to know what percentage of consumers are truly new users and what percentage are regular customers just looking for a discount.

Overall I'm a skeptic, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

What pilots have you done so far? I'd be worried about the risk of fraud (put product on an empty checkout line take photo, don't purchase product), the cost and time for verfication and the risk of disputes eg where photos aren't clear or confusing.

If I were an advertiser I don't know I'd go for it (though obviously some might). The process is too involved and I don't see the benefit over established methods of couponing. It might be interesting if, on entering the store, the consumer is sent a set of promotions that they can only redeem when they leave but this could be via a barcodes that display on the phone and are scanned from the screen - why bother with a photo and the human inspectors? Apart from the possibility of novelty, I can't see a sufficiently strong benefit either to consumers or to advertisers - is there any more to this?

People post images of their pets or of their lunch on social media platforms because they want to.

No one needs to take pictures of these things so that they can load them to Facebook or Instagram.

The action of posting this kind of content for public view is anchored in the individual's desire for social recognition and validation, and less so for financial gain.

Because psychologically speaking there's a lot of difference between a want and a need applying the same logic to your program as one might try to apply to a picture of one's cat does not carry forward into the redemption of discounts in supermarkets.

Taking action to debug software before you've run a test to see if there's a demand for the service puts the cart before the horse. Until you have solid data showing people's rates of interaction, use, redemption, and abandonment of the program, the reality is that you've got little to debug.

It's difficult to calculate things that you cannot (or haven't) measured.

You are strongly advised to run a series of pilot programs over 90 days that test multivariate elements of the program against a series of control groups, then regroup. Then run a second set of tests with your original findings against a second control group.