When competing companies produces synonymous products, a form of completion occurs and different marketing mechanism will be put to use. One of those marketing mechanism is the use of a “Coupon”. A coupon from marketing point of view can be regarded as a documentation or ticket that can be used to trade for a rebate on a product when a customer purchases the product. Manufacturers of consumer packaged goods are the issuers of coupon, these coupons are regularly produced to be available in retail stores as a major part of their sales promotion. Coupons made available through regular mails, the internet, mobile devices like cell phones, magazines and daily newspapers.
The world coupons could also have varying meaning, in finance for instance coupon is related to financial bonds. It is the interest the bond issuer pays the bond holder.
The word coupon is also used in some countries like the United Kingdom as the result of football fixtures predictions that people have placed bet on in a football pool.
The history of coupon dated back 1909 in the United States when it was initially popular. This was the year C.W. Post devise a means to sell breakfast cereals or other products. In the U.S. today a whole lot of corporation offer coupons for rebate on their products or services. Research has shown that coupons for consumer packaged goods creates a value in excess of $3 billion in transactions every year in the U.S. alone. Online coupons can be of different types, it can be discounts, it can be free giveaways, it can be free shipping and can also be first-time customer coupons. Like you can avail discounts on shoes by vivobarefoot discount code. Moreover, cetaphil coupon can be used for skin care products.
Most times retailers always refer internet coupon tags coupon codes, or discount codes, or key codes, or surplus codes, or promotional codes, or reward codes, or shopping codes, or portable codes, or voucher codes etc.
As interesting as a coupon could sound, there has been development of fraud in the usage of coupon. Most customers are deceived to get coupons for products they have purchased and they will later realize that the coupon does not offer any form of rebate for them. But retailers and manufacturers are fast developing a means of countering fraudulent coupons. Protections are now offered for unauthorized copying of coupon codes by developing numerous verification methods of identification that includes coupon ID numbers, and unique barcodes, watermarked paper and holographic seals.
