MoneySaver does it again! With a coup of sorts in the ice cream space, MoneySaver has brought on board its platform Delhi’s delight, Giani, a chain of ice cream parlors. With Giani coming on board, MoneySaver now has a great variety of ice cream parlors to choose from, including the likes of Baskin Robbins, Nirula’s and New Zealand Naturals. This summer seems to be one to look forward to with so many great ice cream offers coming around via MoneySaver, I can’t wait to get my hands on my copy right now!

Today we launched MoneySaver prepaid cards, which have made the experience for consumers to use the MoneySaver service even easier.? These prepaid cards some in 3 forms– 1 month (Rs.99), 3 months (Rs.199) and 6 months (Rs.349). These cards can be purchased from hundreds of locations across the city as well as from www.moneysaver.in.

Consumers can purchase these cards, scratch for the code on the card, SMS it to 09870900900 and can instantly start using their MoneySaver susbcription to save thousands at hundreds of stores.

Thanks to the thousands of MoneySaver customers who have given us valuable feedback to help us make this service even more convenient.

In a recent article in the Economic Times, there was an interesting aspect of the changing landscape of marketing spend in India. The article heads of many leading retailers and advertising companies confirming the rise in promotion driven BTL spends, where-in up to 32-33% of the total promotional budget would go towards BTL promotions.

The primary reason for the shift to BTL is cited as the prohitively expensive ATL. Moreover, control on message is another aspect of BTL advertising that seems to be particularly interesting for consumer centric companies.

Full article here.

Outlook Money wrote an interesting piece on MoneySaver in this fortnight’s edition. Frankly, we were surprised at the due diligence that was conducted about the MoneySaver service. They identified customers, interviewed them, and published their views verbatim. Nothing pleases us more to see our customers so happy with the service, while expecting more from us.

The article can be found here.

Last week while reading through some articles online, I came across this piece in Business Standard which discusses the pull-out of retailers from malls owed to low footfall and sky-rocketing real estate costs:

“ETAM, the French lingerie brand that has a joint venture with Kishore Biyani’s Future Group, recently pulled out of Palm Beach Galleria mall in Navi Mumbai, together with six other retailers such as grocery chain Foodland Fresh and Manoranjan sarees.

Reason: lower footfalls in the mall and high rentals charged by the developer.”

This does not come as a surprise to us, as we deal with 250+ retailers across the country, and the pains pertaining to high real estate costs, high advertising costs, high manpower costs, are a recurring theme, driving significant margin pressures for these companies.

About a year back, we were told by a senior executive at one of the largest apparel retailers in India, “…retailers are in a race to open stores and create distribution as quickly as possible, without necessarily considering the economics of rapid expansion; expect a major shake-out by 2009.”

Often one would see a particular women’s apparel retailer’s stores pop up every now and then. Earlier even we were under the impression that this must be a reflection of strong organic growth. Last month, they shut shop all over India.

The interesting issue that the Business Standard article sheds light on is the similar trend being observed by Tier II cities such as Ahmedabad:

“In Ahmedabad, malls are seeing an exit from retailers in the range of 15-20 percent because they have not able to garner good sales.”

Speak with any retailer, and they will tell you that the next gold mine lies in Tier II cities. However, if we are observing the ?big city effect‘ even in Tier II cities already (probably because real estate developers have factored in aggressive retail expansion plans in their pricing), we may soon see more stories about the rising troubles in the retail sector surface.

As more and more merchants continue to join the MoneySaver network, today we finalized our partnership with Zoomin.com, an online photo and custom printing site. I’m a big fan of the site myself, and having Zoomin.com come on board as a network partner worked out well. Moreover, the deal that Zoomin.com is offering MoneySaver subscribers is quite attractive#Rs.200 gift voucher for ANY purchase from Zoomin.com. That’s around a 100 free prints! Just SMS zoomin to 09870900900. I think I’m using one my coupons right away.

Today was an interesting day#MoneySaver was featured on LiveMint. The folks at Mint were really excited about MoneySaver, which probably was reflected in the amount of coverage that MoneySaver received. The video was very interesting, though it would have been good to discuss what couponing means for retailers. Nonetheless, good exposure for the product. More to come soon.

? LiveMint article: Betting Big on Couponing

It’s finally here! After a lot of hardwork that our team and all our retail partners put in, we have finally brought to consumers, what we believe is a truly fascinating product. Never has there been such a massive participation in a single consumer product initiative across the Indian retail landscape. For this we are very thankful to all our retail partners and congratulate our team.

As the “About Us” section explains, our journey did begin with observing the need for quality incentives that consumers were feeling and the retailer pain of contextual targeting of shoppers to drive conversions from footfall to sales. We looked at a variety of models that have worked and not worked across the world, including India, and through an iterative process and lots of feedback from our retail partners, we created MoneySaver. Blending the touch-and-feel of offline media and the scalable, yet non-obvious use of mobile media for this solution was surely a challenge, but realizing that consumers and retailers need these incentives to be made available anytime and anywhere, made it essential for us to create a solution that accomplished this.

Developing a tremendous amount of expertise about the couponing industry in India has given us insights on what works, doesn’t work and what can work, and as we come out of the nascent stages with MoneySaver and the couponing industry as a whole, our company will explore more and more avenues to deliver value for both consumers and retailers.

Keep a close watch on this blog as we will be discussing a lot of interesting details as well as outlook for the couponing/promotions industry in India.