If you’ve been listening to the radio recently (
at least Hot 107), you’ll surely have heard of Flash Deal dot ca. They’re one of the late
st players in the ever expanding group-buying-groupon-clone market.
They launched today with their first deal: $10 for Steak Dinner for 10 people at The Canadian Brew House. They sold out (100 purchases) at 7.45am, which is particularly impressive as the email about it went out at 6.02am.
So, few observations about the particular deal…
The Fine Print
As with all these kinds of deals, there’s fine print, but usually it’s not very relevant or interesting. I found this deals fine print interesting for a few reasons…
First, it’s only valid at peak hours. Thur-Sat, 4pm onwards. Why? If you’re going to give away the house for free, which they really are, why do it at the busiest times, when you’ll be taking attention away from full paying customers? Surely you want these couple branding people to come in on a Tuesday afternoon when it’s quieter?
One guess as to why is they’re not very busy ever, so by having people there during their peak times they’ll make the place seem busy.
Another peculiarity is that you need to make a reservation. Now, I’ve never been to a Canadian Brew House, but as I understand, they’re kind of like Boston Pizza, so reservations seem a little weird. The logical reason is so they can make sure they have tonnes of 7oz steaks kicking around. Or, maybe they’ll be restricting the number of these deals that can come at one time. Perhaps if you call them next week after buying the deal and try and book they’ll tell you that you can’t get a spot for a few weeks…
Say they restrict it to 2 groups of 10 per night (3 per week) per location (3), it’ll take 6 weeks before they can serve everyone. It’s possible.
Anyway, the deal is pretty good and I’d say worthy of being a launch deal for them. They certainly put a lot of effort into marketing the deal, with radio ads for the last few days talking about how good of a deal it is, which is something I’ve never seen any of the other group buying services do.
About Flash Deals
Flash Deals seems to be a little bit unique in that they’re Edmonton based and only (for now anyway) serve Edmonton. A little bit of digging reveals they’re a product of Eight Leaves Media, a local marketing firm. In their own words…
Eight Leaves Media is an Edmonton based customer analytics firm. We develop data-driven marketing solutions to help your organization acquire, develop, and retain profitable, long-term customer relationships.
Seems that they’ve noticed the group-buying thing going on (who hasn’t?) and jumped on the bandwagon. They’ve obviously decided that to stand out they have to spend some money on marketing, instead of just letting word of mouth like most of the other guys. Living Social is perhaps the only other one that I’ve seen actually advertising, with tons of Google Banner ads, but never offline.
The group-buying thing has become so big that you can even buy pre-made group-buying websites and marketing packages from the kind of people that advertise in franchise magazines. For example, I came across Daily Deals Etc who, for a $49/month service fee, will give you a daily deals type website all ready to go, just add deals and subscribers! They’ll take care of the website, payments, support, etc. Talk about lowering the barrier to entry!
Good luck to Flash Deals, and good luck to The Canadian Brew House when it comes to preparing those 10,000 steak dinners they just sold!
I’m going to be writing a post shortly about all of the group buying companies currently serving Edmonton, including they’re offerings for businesses, which are all quite different!
