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  • From: "Caryl Elzinga" <alderspring AT salmoninternet.com>
  • To: <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] discounts
  • Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2003 10:29:00 -0700

Here's another question for both meat and other product marketers.

Do discounts work, or do they actually work against you?

Here's what I mean. I'm a discount shopper for many items (mostly
non-food). I know, for example, that sales on paper towels come up
regularly, so I only buy them when on sale. After a bit you get a sense for
the cyclical timing of such sales, and can stock up about the right amount
during a sale period.

Now, why wouldn't your regular customers (if price is even an issue, and if
not a discount is irrelevant) wait to buy until you have your sale (e.g, the
last hour of market, the last month of the summer, mid winter)? What you
have essentially done is set the "real" price of your product at the sale
price. And if just use a discount to attract new customers on price, won't
they drop you or feel cheated when you sell the next round at your normal
price?

The reason I ask is that we are looking for ways to find new customers that
are primarily families (rather than the high income young retirees or
no-kids clientale our marketing currently targets--the tenderloin eaters; a
side story: my husband delivered a beef yesterday to the Co-op that carries
our stuff year round and within an hour a woman came in (who had asked in
advance to be called when we delivered) and bought every tenderloin).
Although our beef is selling really well at the co-op, since we whole-sale
to them our net per animal isn't that great, and the coordination still
requires a lot of time. We justify it in that it keeps our beef available
year-round when the farmer's market is closed, and reaches additional
clientele, but we'd really prefer to deal direct with people rather than
through a store. We need to find clintele that will buy a quarter, or at
least one of our 20lb packs, rather than the tenderloin only!

But the discount approach, which is the typical way to attract new
customers, seems to be shooting oneself in the foot. We are not marketers,
but surely there must be some other ideas to attract new customers other
than discounts.






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