News

Over-the-road offers

December 7, 2005

It's an all-too-common evening for a typical pizza customer. Mom, Dad or both are driving home from work, traffic's moving slower than that afternoon's staff meeting, and the chance of cooking dinner is decreasing by the minute. Picking up a pizza is a possibility, but the coupons are on the fridge at home ... unless the pizzeria coupons are SunVISOR Values (SVV).

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The new marketing product, recently released by A'Deas Printing, is a print coupon engineered to wrap around a car's sun visor. When customers are behind the wheel, the coupons are at their fingertips.

"The coupons are in your face, right where you can find them," said Roth Christopherson, president of A'Deas and creator of SunVISOR Values. "It makes your coupons much easier to use when the customer is on the go."

A SunVISOR Value coupon sheet is 6 inches wide, 17 inches long and wraps around all makes of visors. A resealable adhesive on one end of the sheet sticks to the other end.

"When the customer puts the visor down, they see the coupons," said Christopherson. "When they flip the visor up, it shows other information about the business, such as phone numbers, the pizzeria's story or new offers. They see your message on both sides, whether the visor's up or down."

Christopherson said a large Pizza Hut franchise group tested the response rate of SVVs against identical offers printed on boxtoppers and coupons sent through Advo. In the end, SVVs outpaced the other two not only in redemption rate, but in average guest check.

"The per-guest-check averages 59 cents higher than with the same offer on a regular boxtopper," said Christopherson. "That's huge when you extend it out over thousands of orders a week."

The Pizza Hut franchise declined to be interviewed for the article.

A bright future

Marketing consultant Kamron Karington said the idea behind the SVV intrigues him. The notion of having coupons at the ready when hunger strikes is smart because it's convenient.

"The good thing is they're there right when (the customer) needs them, especially if the sun's hitting them in the face," said Karington, a former owner of four pizzerias. "These will work best with coupon-type people who keep coupons in their purses, their wallets and under their car seats already."

Karington wondered, however, how consistently customers will make the effort to put the coupons on their car visors. "It's the same challenge with boxtoppers. The customer might get them, but will they put them on the fridge?"

That step may require a little coaching from the pizzeria staff, he said.

"If it was targeted to people in such a way as, 'Would you like to put this on your sun visor?'" then they'll better understand what to do with it, he said. "But if you hand them out like candy and simply hope they all land on the sun visor, you're kidding yourself. You have to be deliberate about it. If they do that, it'll probably work."