100% this. I think people who have not worked directly in marketing dramatically underestimate just how much of marketing at a big company is taking credit for sales that were going to happen anyways. People have performance driven bonuses/promotions/whatever, TRULY generating demand is very hard, taking credit for sales you didn’t drive is WAY easier, and most companies have very feeble checks and balances against this.

For example, talk to anyone running Google AdWords campaigns, they’ll tell about “branded” vs “unbranded” search terms, and how you should treat them all as one big bucket. They’ll say the unbranded terms generate demand, while the branded terms are the “closers.” This is PURE BS. “Branded terms” are literally someone searching for “Jira”, clicking the ad that takes you to Jira instead of the top non-ad link right below it, buying Jira, then saying “they bought it because of the ad.” Unbranded is people searching for “issue tracking software”, seeing a Jira ad, clicking it, then buying. That’s legit, but likely the CAC for unbranded is like 2-5x the LTV of the customer, and totally not worth it. But if you lump it together with the “branded” ads (people literally searching for your exact product, and randomly deciding to click the ad over the legit search result right below it), the CAC looks great. Marketing is FULL of BS like this.

If your competitors are advertising for your name, they will close many of your potential customers. Unfortunately, Google pushes everyone to do branded ads this way.

Isn't this a useful form of price discrimination, though? The coupons allow you to sell your products at full price to those who are price insensitive, while also allowing you to sell at a discount to price-sensitive buyers. Only the latter are willing to go to the hassle of looking up the coupon codes.

My wife installed a plug-in on our family computer that looks up coupon codes for you at checkout time. But often they don't work, so I don't even bother with them. To me, that suggests that even if its 'easy' to find the coupon codes, the coupons still work as a form of price discrimination.

Favoring those who are price sensitive isn't necessarily benefitting those who are less wealthy (this wasn't explicitly stated, but it's often implied in praises of price discrimination, please let me know of this isn't what you meant with this comment). Wealthier people often have time to find better prices, or have others find better prices for them. Also, people with better information skills are often better at identifying the best price (and people with such skills tend to be better off in general). A poor person balancing several jobs may not have much time to research prices.

On priniciple I'm usually okay with rewarding diligence and thoughtfulness, but penalising those who lack the ability to perform this diligence and thoughtfulness may not be the best thing in this case.

The comment I was responding to was implying that coupons were an outdated marketing strategy. I was saying that I think it can help companies achieve higher margins by selling at higher prices to wealthier customers, while still achieving sales at lower (but still profitable) prices with less wealthy customers.

I wasn't making any comment on the social good of price discrimination. I agree with you that some pricing strategies (buying in bulk, buying without loans/interest, rewards cards, etc) may tend to reward the wealthy. But that wasn't related to the point I was trying to make. I was trying to say that coupons seem like they could still be a useful marketing strategy for improving companies average margins per sale.

Which plugin are you referring to that you don't bother with? The main one I know of is honey, which is automated, and takes about ten seconds while they run through the most popular, and if you choose to continue they'll run through the full list of recently valid coupons which adds at most another twenty seconds. 30 seconds of time to save 10 to 30 percent most of the time is worth it to me. The only time I ever think to skip the check is on sites like Amazon or Wal-Mart where the majority of coupons are for very specific items. But even on sites like Jet and Target I often get lucky.

Yes, I think it is honey.

You are right that it isn't that much effort to try it. I find it annoying because they never seem to work for me. In a world where our behavior is closely tracked, I have come to wonder if the coupons don't work for me because some algorithm has figured out that I don't care.

Which actually takes things full circle from the original comment I was responding to: I wonder if online coupons are now so sophisticated that they can _only_ be offered to the price sensitive. If so, I suspect even more strongly that they are still a good/relevant marketing strategy.

There's also brand image to consider. Constant sales or coupons affect that (and good luck dropping those once customers are used to it). Maybe it makes sense in some cases though? Vice versa for others.

What's their opinion of Apple, for example? Would they operate the same way there?