Recently, deal-of-the-day Web site Groupon got a lot of attention because of Google’s interest in its business. We understand that there are a few attractive pieces to the Groupon story — it’s theoretically a very lucrative business model. My colleague Sucharita Mulpuru commented on this at the end of November with a post highlighting the business opportunities of deal-of-the-day sites. What I was interested in was the customer side: Who is actually using these sites?

Our Technographics® data shows that the majority of US online consumers aren’t familiar with deal-of-the-day sites like Groupon or Living Social, and another 25% haven't used them yet.

Looking at these numbers, you could say that there's quite some opportunity for growth. However, the current users have quite a unique profile: The 3% of US consumers who frequently use deal-of-the-day sites have a lot of money to spend (about half of them report having an average household income of $100K or more), and they expect to spend more money online this year than last year. They are twice as likely to be influenced by what's hot and what's not, two-thirds are willing to try new things, and 62% agree that they often change their mind about which brand to buy after doing some research — making them the ideal target audience for deal-of-the-day sites.