The deal-a-day website Groupon has had a pretty good year. They've rocketed to fame, more than doubled their unique visitors (4.6 million in May, according to Compete.com), and just last week started partnering with a few major newspapers.
CorePower Yoga, one of the Twin Cities' most popular yoga studios, took advantage of Groupon's fame with a coupon for a free month of classes on Friday. However, the catch was that the coupon couldn't be used if you had purchased a package or taken a class within the last 60 days.
Obviously, this was CorePower's attempt to bring in people who were probably new to yoga or weren't familiar with the studio. However, the majority of people who would want to use the coupon were victims of that fine print stipulation.
This resulted in quite a backlash on Friday, with a flurry of angry and frustrated tweets and posts about not being able to use the CorePower deal.
This brings up an intriguing issue with these mass deal-a-day web coupons. With Groupon launching coupons back into the mainstream, at what point do promotions and deals like these factor into a company's social media plan? More importantly, what will be your response if that coupon isn't received all that positively?
