In a very interesting blog post, which you can find here, Gavin Dunaway talked about how Social Media is spurring a new generation of coupon clipper that is replacing the more ambitious person who used to spend every Sunday clipping coupons from the newspaper. Today’s savvy consumers are following brands in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in order to get the deal. The article talks about how brands engaged in social media are potentially too liberal with providing offers to their followers in order to build loyalty. I’m not sure I agree that providing offers is a poor way to reward loyal shoppers. However, let’s not confuse loyalty with dependency on offers. Brands want to build dependency but only to a point. Brands should be realistic that consumers are deal-hungry and may not be following the brand for anything else but a good deal. However, I’m not sure that the brand has much of a choice in today’s economy and a loyal following, regardless of how it happened, is still better than giving up customers and market share to the competition.
