Business Model Institute : Groupon Business Model vs. Val-Pak

For some, coupons are dead and are a relic of the older days. I’m a heavily Internet-connected late 30s tech-aware consumer and yet I still open my envelope of Val-Pak coupons. I look at each and every coupon and from time-to-time I keep a coupon or two.

This has me wonder if the Val-Pak business model can still survive in the age of Groupon? Are the business models of these seemingly different businesses really that different? Both companies want you to take them up on their offer and seek out the businesses they are effectively advertising and promoting.

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Business Week : Why Did Newspapers Take So Long to Copy Groupon?

"To be fair to newspapers, not even Web giants such as Google and Yahoo have managed to come up with something like Groupon, which is a big part of why Google wanted to acquire it. But if anyone was in a position to do so, it should have been the newspaper industry; after all, who else already has relationships with hundreds, or even thousands, of local merchants and businesses? The problem for newspapers was seeing those relationships in a different way: not just as a static provider of banner ads and full-page color spreads for the advertising salespeople to harvest on a semiannual or quarterly basis, but as a resource the papers could connect directly to customers for a fee."

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