Car and Driver and Road & Track, two recent Hearst Magazine acquisitions, will be offering their readers group buying deals starting later this summer. It will be using Group Commerce's platform, the company reports.
The deals will be based on various automotive and lifestyle categories, promoted to the Car and Driver and Road & Track audiences through in-book and online promotional units, newsletters, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and mobile apps. The deals will be branded as Car and Driver and Road & Track offers, and in many cases are expected to be exclusive opportunities. Some of the initial offerings include a custom product bundle from Gladiator Garage, an exclusive Corvette driving school package at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch and signed motorsports prints from famed photographers.
Women, Moms Wooed Excessively
In the burgeoning group buying market it is surprising to find a new twist to the model. The two publications' relatively novel offer, though, is a testament, to how overlooked men - the primary readers of these publications - can be by marketers. Generally speaking women, particularly mothers, are seen as controllers of the purse strings and therefore the ideal target.
Not that this is inaccurate. Any number of studies can bolster this point. Smartphones, in particular, are seen as their channel of choice. American moms are more likely than overall women own a smartphone, according to data from BabyCenter, which has found that 53% of moms say they purchased a smartphone as a direct result of becoming a mom.
Men, though, love their smartphones too and increasingly marketers are targeting them through those devices as well. Recently Old Navy rolled out a mobile campaign, developed by Camp + King, whose goal was to reach out men between the ages of 25-35 precisely because of their high rate of mobile usage, Mobile Marketer reports.
This was Old Navy's first direct effort targeting men in a while, the publication said. Not only did it target men's love of their smartphone devices but it also played on an underutilized fact: namely that men don’t hate to shop, they just shop differently than women.
"In general, dads have always gotten the short shrift when it comes to parenting, but in recent times, it's been different," said Jeffrey Sass, single parent and blogger for Dad-O-Matic. (via the New York Times). He added that advertisers focus so much on mommy bloggers "because everyone believes the mother makes many of the buying decisions in the home, but in product categories like consumer electronics, it makes sense to go after dads."
