Study: Groupons tend to tarnish a brand’s reputation

Now that we seem to be on the (rocky) road to recovery, we may see a trend of quality businesses shying away from daily deal sites. New research shows that offering a Groupon tends to hurt a brand’s online reputation.

A team of Boston University and Harvard University researchers studied more than 16,000 Groupon deals in 20 U.S. cities over six months this year. They also monitored Yelp reviews of those companies.

Form MIT’s Technology Review blog:

” … a Groupon deal seems to have an adverse impact on reputation as measured by Yelp ratings. Their analysis shows that while the number of reviews increases significantly due to daily deals, average rating scores from reviewers who mention daily deals are about 10 percent lower than scores of their peers.”