1.     Introduction

Deals, Incentives, Promotions, and Coupons are the cornerstone of modern life and every consumer likes a good deal. It appeals to the limbic brain – primitive brain and makes them feel good.  This has been the basis of offering incentives and deals.  National Brands offered most of the deals and coupons with massive distribution.  The deals were offered at local levels too, but the distribution was limited.  With or without Internet, National Brands had a distinctive advantage over local merchants for they have bigger marketing budgets.  Local business and local merchants are the mainstay of any neighborhood and society at large. Unfortunately with the inequity in terms of financial strength of National Brands, the local brands are fighting for their survival.

Internet was supposed to democratize this inequity between National and Local Merchants. Internet never equalized this gap for local merchants – National Brands continued to have distinct advantages for they had the marketing muscle and distributed their content through hundreds of affiliate sites, which generated leads and amplified their message. The affiliate sites were paid either for performance, clicks, views, registration and a combination thereof. The fundamental problem is: How could local merchants compete with National Brands?

2.     Local Economy and the Market

The Local Merchants market place is highly fragmented and scaling has been very difficult. Lots of Companies have tried and failed till the advent of Groupon.  Groupon is deal-of-the-day website that is localized to major markets in USA. As of October 2010, they operate in 150 markets in North America and 100 markets in Europe. Groupon started two years ago, and has been one of the fastest growing companies, It is believed that their revenue run rate is $2 Billion for year 2011.

Till Groupon’s arrival to local market place, there was absolutely no distribution for local markets. They have been able to accomplish this by offering deep discounts on everything they offer. And once again they have taken over this market the old-fashioned way by hiring thousand of sales people in every local market to keep the pipeline of deals going. They have been able to drive traffic to local merchants, and by any measure, they have done an extraordinary job on bringing focus to the local merchants.

Local Marketplace is the cornerstone of any neighborhood and provides sustenance to the local economy. It is the fabric of any society – it connects goods, people, and things. It is the essence of community from times immemorial.  It is a huge marketplace, if it can sustain in the long run.  The deals marketplace is substantial and is as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Daily Deals Market

Though Groupon is widely successful, it begs the question if this is sustainable in the long run.

3.     Sustainability and Issues of Local Marketplace

Though Groupon is widely successful, it begs the question of sustainability. It is impossible for any merchant to survive for long offering deep discounts.  The local merchants have enormous challenges to compete with National Brands.  Groupon is one solution, though good, is not sustainable.

The local merchants need tools and solutions where they get the same exposure as the National Brands with a fraction of the cost. They cannot compete with enormous market reach of National Brands in terms of marketing, deep discounts, distribution, advertising, and technology advantages.

There are lots of tools available but local merchants are not adept at using them. The tools though available virtually free are fragmented. The tools need specialists and this would be very expensive and impractical for local merchants.  There are lots of places where merchants can be listed either free or for a fee. The sites include City Search, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google Place, and a host of other sites. The consumers are inundated with information, and most of it is meaningless and irrelevant to their needs.

Distribution is the hallmark of any business. Without the right distribution, the business has very little chance to survive let alone compete. A solution that incorporates distribution of content and creation of deals at virtually no cost to merchants is the ideal solution. This solution provides hope to local merchants. And more important, it is critical that local operators provide the solution so that the money flow is within the local community. The local operators include local malls, local media companies (TV & Radio), local city governments, neighborhood merchant association, etc. All these groups are deeply connected with their local community and have a better chance to market and distribute the deals to the local marketplace.

4.     Local Marketplace solution

Any solution that helps local market place should have the ability to compete with National Brands and have the following attributes:

·        Content and Deals Distribution on Web

·        Content and Deals Distribution on Affiliate Sites

·        Content and Deals Distribution on Mobile Platforms (phone, Blackberry, Android, Nonie, Windows)

·        Content and Deals Distribution on Social Media (Face book) and Micro logs (Twitter)

·        Deals Interface to create deals and make it available on all channels instantaneously

·        Cloud Platform to make the solution offering comparable to any enterprise solution

·        Analytics and Reporting to merchants so that merchants can offer meaningful content and deals

·        Personalization of deals by neighborhood and other attributes

·        Customer lists for each Merchant based on opt-in to receive future deals and offers from each of the local merchants

·        Built-in viral features to invite friends and family

·        Social Media Applications to drive more traffic

·        SEO Optimized local marketplace website to drive more traffic

·        Content tagging

·        Deals Anytime/Anywhere on Mobile Phone

·        Deals-of-the-day Offering

The ideal platform discussed above offered to local merchants at a reasonable price would clearly help them compete effectively and sustain their business. It is imperative that ideal platforms combine content, deals-of-the-day, and local deals. The existing solutions in the marketplace do not address this, and there is huge opportunity for any local operator to offer the above platform.

5.     PowDeal Platform and Solution

To drive traffic, it is important to promote the local business offers on a wide variety of channels - web, mobile, twitter, and social networking. How do you utilize all these channels to maximize your impact with limited marketing budget? PowDeal is the answer. PowDeal combines most of the features as specified in the previous section.

PowDeal’s robust content and deals platform (“Platform”) allows local businesses to create digital discounts and promotions instantaneously. The discounts and promotions are accessed by the customers on all channels - mobile device, Facebook, Twitter, local business website, and other affiliate sites. PowDeal has integrated a robust location based services (“LBS”) platform. The applications built with PowDeal LBS are location sensitive. The consumers can find promotions and discounts anytime/anywhere relevant to their current geographic location.

Search and keywords are integral to finding the right content. This is integrated with the Platform, and can be used with virtually no coding. The content that is created or imported within the Platform can have attributes and keywords, and this enables personalized search for consumers.

Social media is being widely used to discover content by consumers. The Platform integrates with Facebook and Twitter, and local business can use this without coding to promote their content and drive traffic.

Using the Platform content is distributed through a variety of affiliate sites either as RSS Feeds, XML Feeds, and Widgets.  This gives local businesses an opportunity to distribute their content widely and thereby increasing traffic.

In addition to RSS and XML feeds, the Platform provides a robust API that can be used by other applications to promote local business deals. It is impossible to anticipate future applications. In lieu of that the Platform API will provide basic deal, search, and lbs functionality that developers can use to create new applications. The API can also be used to build mobile applications. The Platform comes with 4 native mobile apps that can be used to promote local business deals. The mobile platforms supported include iPhone, Blackberry, and Android.

The content and deals that are created within the Platform are flexible and support a wide variety of attributes – start date of the deal, value of the deal, end date of the deals, number of downloads allowed, support for images, “copy” for content, renew an old deal, keywords for the deal, neighborhood information for the deal, and a host of other features. The deals can then be made available on Facebook and Twitter.

6.     PowDeal Advantages

Powdeal is the only company with a comprehensive deals and content platform that can be white labeled.  Powdeal will customize the site to suit your needs including adding deals-of-the-day features for local merchants.  The solution offered lends itself to be operated by local operators. The Platform helps local economy by sustaining local economy and keeps the money flow within the local economy. Powdeal empowers consumers, and make them feel good about their community.

With PowDeal, you have a partner that will take care of your technology needs in terms of content and deals. It also runs your application as a service and will provide 24x7 IT and Technical support. This will help you can focus on your business and get more consumer traction!

The Platform is horizontally scalable meaning by adding more servers we can support demand. The local operators can start with a few servers and add more servers as the demand increases.  The Platform is designed to be highly available and fault tolerant.

Powdeal will offer Cloud Platform as a service with both IT and Application support. Cloud computing has reduced the costs of running a business. The Platform supports Cloud and appropriate resources deployed based on customers demand and affordability.

Management of the application is critical so that the consumers and businesses are supported immediately. And also the applications have to run effectively 24x7 with no disruption of service. The Platform comes with a management interface where a local business can be provisioned and supported.

7.     Contact Information

If interested in PowDeal Platform, please contact Jagadish Channagiri at the following address:

Email:  Jagadish@powdeal.com

Phone: 408 743 4449 (O)

              650 245 1884 (C)