• 1. Andrew Mason admits that Groupon has thousands of copycats, yet his assessment is that imitating Groupon is difficult. Do you agree?
Groupon and the sincerest form of flattery

Chicago-based Groupon was launched in 2008 by Andrew Mason with the idea to email subscribers daily deals of heavily discounted coupons for local restaurants, theatres, spas, etc. Groupon sells a coupon for a product and takes up to half of the proceeds, which represents a big discount on the product’s usual price. In return, Groupon aggregates demand from the customers who receive its emails, providing exposure to and increased business for the local merchants. The venture rapidly became the fastest-growing Internet business ever and grew into a daily deal industry giant. In 2010 Groupon rejected a $6 bn (€4.5 bn) takeover bid by Google and instead went public at $10 bn in November of 2011.

While Groupon’s daily deals were valued by customers – the company quickly spread to over 40 countries – they also attracted first hundreds and later thousands of copycats worldwide. Investors started to question Groupon’s business model and to what extent it had rare and inimitable strategic capabilities. In 2012 the CEO Andrew Mason denied in Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that the model was too easy to replicate:

“There’s proof. There are over 2000 direct clones of the Groupon business model. However, there’s an equal amount of proof that the barriers to success are enormous. In spite of all those competitors, only a handful are remotely relevant”

This, however, did not calm investors and the online coupon seller’s shares promptly fell by 80 percent to its all-time low. The question thus remained – to what extent were Groupon’s capabilities rare and inimitable? One significant asset Groupon had that is rare and possibly difficult to imitate is its impressive customer base of more than 50 million customers. The more customers, the better deals would make customers come to Groupon rather than the competitors and the cost for competitors to acquire customers would increase. Critics argued that other companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon had an even broader user base and could become competitors. Further defending Groupon’s competitiveness, the CEO emphasized in WSJ that it is not as simple as providing daily deals via email, but that a whole series of things have to work together and to imitate Groupon competitors would have to replicate everything in its ‘operational complexity’:

“People overlook the operational complexity. We have 10,000 employees across 46 countries. We have thousands of salespeople talking to tens of thousands of merchants every single day. It’s not an easy thing to build”

Another resource that Andrew Mason stressed was Groupon’s advanced technology platform allowed the company to ‘provide better targeting to customers and give them deals that are more relevant to them’. Part of this platform, however, was got via acquisitions – a route competitors possibly could take as well. If imitation is the highest form of flattery Groupon has been highly complimented. Hundreds of copycats have, however, left the business and Groupon has also beaten back more serious competitors, but the company continues to be under considerable pressure. In February 2013 founder and CEO Andrew Mason was forced to step down, which was a sign that many changes would come at Groupon.

Questions

1.  Andrew Mason admits that Groupon has thousands of copycats, yet his assessment is that imitating Groupon is difficult. Do you agree?
2.  Assess the bases of Groupon’s strategic capabilities using the VRIO criteria
3.  Which is the most important strategic capability that provides, or could provide, Groupon with a sustainable competitive advantage?

Time: 1 ½ Hours

Marks: 20 Marks