Groupon has been described as a number of things – coupon merchant, advertising business, the missing bit of Google, and Ponzi scheme.
It’s also a publisher, with a content strategy that can be summarised as follows:
- Recruit a great many experienced writers and pay them well. They have around 1,000 writers, and are hiring furiously around the world. US salaries are 37k a year, and many writers are refugees from journalism.
- Devise a style guide to ensure that each offer has a quirky description, frequently touching on invented historical anecdotes, zombies or animals.
- Profit.
Of course, Groupon hasn’t yet achieved step three but it may only be a matter of time.
If you’re not familiar with Groupon, it’s a platform advertising special offers from local businesses. It contacts small businesses to persuade them to set up a significant discount on its goods and services then uses email, mobile, Twitter, FaceBook and its website to advertise them for a limited amount of time. It works because it effectively delivers attention and the promise of a large number of customers in a short time – a bit like an advert in a newspaper for a huge one-day sale in a local department store.
And there is the now famous Groupon voice, which appears to break all the rules of writing sales copy.
To put it bluntly, they don’t really sell. One aspiring candidate was told that “even hinting that the item on offer was in some way good was too “sales-y””
Groupon writers should avoid “positing our deal as the obvious solution to the reader’s imaginary problems”.
And they shouldn’t make “repetitive use of the imperative. The reader doesn’t want to be told what to do.” I think numerous marketers would disagree with that last assertion.
Instead of salesy copy, they describe the offers in a madcap fashion. Groupon’s style guide recommends using “Absurd images. Sweeping, dramatic nonsense, hypothetical worlds, fake proverbs, fake history and illogical comparisons.”
And those lists of three, without which a Groupon offer would seem naked.
When Yoga was first discovered it wasn’t taken seriously because the best practitioners were holistic hounds, contemplative crows, and flexible fish…
If foam noodles can be found floating on the surface of almost every pool, think how many perfectly salted meatballs must be at the bottom of the ocean. Start discovering the sea’s sunken treats with today’s Groupon…
And so on. Will it last? “Whimsy, like black lace underwear, is all right in its place” according to Rexroth, so perhaps whimsy has found its place in Groupon. “Nothing odd will do long” said Johnson, so perhaps it hasn’t.