• by Erik Sass , June 11, 2008

Good Housekeeping is teaming up with 200 retailers to create an incentives program, Good Housekeeping Rewards, that covers both online and brick-and-mortar shopping. The incentive program, designed and administered by Affinity Solutions, will allow subscribers to get up to 20% cash back on their purchases from the retail partners, which they can then use toward other purchases from participating retailers.

The retail partners offering discounts include Macy's (10%), Wal-Mart (4%), Banana Republic (10%), Nordstrom (5%), Adidas (5%) and Target (3%). Some of these discounts are contingent on the amount spent during the visit. After an online shopper signs up for the program, the Good Housekeeping Rewards Web site will direct them to the sites of these retailers, where their purchases will be tracked and tallied by Affinity. Once the participating consumer accumulates $20 of cash-back credit, they will receive a Good Housekeeping-branded Mastercard prepaid card, which they can use for online purchases as well as visits to retail locations.

Rosemary Ellis, editor in chief of Good Housekeeping, said the new service is in line with the historical brand, which has always dispensed advice on purchases; now it will actually facilitate them. "The Good Housekeeping Rewards program delivers on our brand promise by offering readers savings on purchases they make every day," she says.

The new program also holds out the possibility of more precise measurement of consumer response to online advertising, as the prepaid Mastercard could (technically) enable the retail partners to link ad exposure to purchase decisions, both online and offline. Good Housekeeping didn't say whether the service would try to correlate exposure to Web advertising with consumption choices; however, a number of retailers have created loyalty and incentive programs that do something similar.

In January, ShopRite launched a pilot program in 220 grocery stores on the East Coast testing SmartCarts powered by Microsoft, which use digital screens attached to shopping carts to display advertising based on the shopper's physical location in the store. The SmartCarts can further refine ad targeting with information about the consumer's past preferences and their current shopping list, collected via customer loyalty programs.

Meanwhile, in March, leading packaged-goods companies--including Clorox, Del Monte, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, and Procter & Gamble--said they are teaming up with Kroger to test a system for distributing electronic coupons to mobile devices. The test campaign, based on Cellfire's technology for managing shopping lists on mobile devices, will target 25- to-34-year-olds with coupons for home and baby-care products.

To participate in the paperless coupon test, the consumer must be a member of Kroger's loyalty-card program. As with ShopRite, the card ID is also a login for Kroger's Web site, where members can create online shopping lists.