Have Daily Deals Finally Gone Mainstream?
Love it or hate it BBC1′s The Apprentice continues to capture our imagination and just occasionally provides an insight into the world of UK business. This Wednesday’s programme saw the 7 remaining contestants, who compete for a business investment from Lord Sugar, compete with one another to secure daily deals from London businesses to run on Daily Deals site Keynoir.
Key Noir, which was brought by Time Out Magazine in November 2011 (presumably after this series of the Apprentice was filmed) for a reported £2-3 million, markets itself as an exclusive deals site aimed at the higher end of the market – a point which made laboriously throughout Wednesday nights show.
Although Groupon and other prominent daily deals sites like KGB and Living Social have been in the public awareness for some time now the Apprentice daily deals programme does go someway to lifting the veil of mystery surrounding how a deal comes together for the general public – most of whom probably haven’t given much thought to how the deals they’re buying breakdown in monetary terms between the daily deal site and the business itself.
It was also useful free publicity for KeyNoir, although this probably would of worked better if the CEO had of pronounced the company name clearly on the one opportunity the BBC gave him (it was thereafter referred to as “the daily deal site”! ) This led to many people taking to forums asking “what was the daily deals site featured on the Apprentice last night!?”
Deal Zippy also experienced a surge in traffic after Wednesday’s show -thanks Alan;-) This suggests the show may have woken a lot of people up to daily deal sites and perhaps reassured them that actually the discounts you see advertised on places like Deal Zippy are genuine reductions off the normal RRP – unlike most of the deals we see in supermarkets.
I was personally quite impressed with how the contestants handled the task and some of the deals they managed to get setup during the programme – although as ever with the Apprentice you have to wonder to what extent the presence of the cameras at these business meetings helps to sway the outcome!
You can see Wednesday nights Apprentice on BBC Iplayer.
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