GB1597201A - Coded coupon - Google Patents

Description

(54) CODED COUPON (71) We, A.C. NIELSEN COMPANY, a company organised and existing under the laws of the State of Delaware, United States of America of Nielsen Plaza, Northbrook, Illinois 60062, United States of America do hereby declare the invention for which we pray that a patent may be granted to us, and the method by which it is to be performed to be particularly described in and by the following statement: This invention relates generally to coupons for use in merchandising and having a monetary value when exchanged for specified goods.

One of the problems associated with the present day redeemable merchandising coupons is the excessive amount of handling usually required in the redemption process.

Firstly, the coupon must be manually redeemed at the point of sale by a retailer, who subsequently sorts the redeemed coupons and sends them to the manufacturer issuing the coupon or to a clearing house.

When the coupons are received by the clearing house, they are manually read and sorted, and the account of the retailer submitting the coupons is credited with the aggregate value of the coupons together with an appropriate handling charge. while the various manufacturers' accounts are debited. In addition. a report is submitted to certain manufacturers indicating the number and value of the coupons redeemed, the origin of the redeemed coupons (i.e., whether they originated in a newspaper, magazine or box top), the regions in which the coupons were redeemed and other information.

The manual handling of the coupons requires a considerable amount of time both at the point of sale and at the clearing house. At the point of sale, the coupon must be visually inspected and a determination made as to whether the product called for by the coupon was purchased. The coupons must then be sorted and sent to the appropriate manufacturers or clearing houses. At the clearing house, the coupons are again visually inspected to determine if they are valid (eg., unexpired) and sorted according to offers. After the coupons have been sorted according to offers, the number of coupons relating to each offer are counted, and the appropriate reports are generated. In addition, the respective manufacturers' and retailers' accounts are debited and credited.

Typically, each manufacturer has a large number of offers outstanding relating to various products, and to various sizes and flavors of that product. In addition different offers are made by publishing coupons in various magazines, newspapers and other publications. When this is done, the manufacturer usually desires to know the origin of each coupon in order to determine the effectiveness of his advertising campaign. so coupons relating to the same product which appear in different publications are typically segregated under different offers, each being identified by a different offer number.

As a result, the number of separate offers is quite large, thus requiring each coupon to be carefully inspected and segregated according to offer. This results in a rather complicated segregation process that requires each coupon to be handled twice, i.e., first during an inspection process where the coupons are segregated according to offers, and then during a counting process where the number of coupons relating to each offer are counted. Such a duplication of handling is quite time consuming and expensive.

For these and other reasons, systems have been developed for coding coupons so that they may be read automatically; however, such coding systems are directed either toward the clearing house operation, or to the point-of-sale operation. No system to date has been developed that is compatible with the presently used Universal Product Code and which is usable at the point of sale, and which also contains all of the information required by a clearing house operation.

Typically prior art coded coupons are described in United States Patents Nos.

3,211,470; 3,632.995 and 3,959,624. The coupons disclosed in these patents provide a way automatically to determine the value and related product of a coupon, but none of the coupons utilizes a coding system that is compatible with the Universal Product Code and readable by point-of-sale apparatus, and which contains enough information to be useful in a clearing house operation.

For example, the coded coupons described in Patents Nos. 3,211,470 and 3,632,995 are designed to be used in a clearing house operation, and include data relating to the related product, size and packaging of the product, region of distribution, manufacturer, premium value, price of the product and other data. However, the codes incorporating such data are relatively complex and not readable by point-of-sale scanning equipment because the codes employed are not compatible with the Universal Product Code. Furthermore, the data relating to point-of-sale operations is intermixed with data relating to clearing house operations and cannot conveniently be separated out at the point of sale.

The coupon described in United States Patent No. 3,959.624 utilizes a Universal Product Code (UPC) symbol printed on the coupon, and is readable by point-of-sale scanning equipment. However. the UPC symbol does not contain enough information to be usable in a clearing house operation, and also, the product information in the UPC symbol present on the coupon appears to define only a single product, rather than to a family of products, and hence, such a coupon cannot automatically be redeemed for various sizes or flavors of a particular product, as is common coupon practice.

It is an object of the present invention to provide a coded coupon that is mechanically readable by point-of-sale apparatus and contains all of the information required by a clearing house operation.

According to the present invention there is provided a coupon for use in merchandising and having a monetary value when exchanged for specified goods, the coupon being characterised by having printed or otherwise disposed thereon first and second coded areas encoded in a machine readable code and comprising a plurality of elongated bars and spaces of different widths, said areas being arranged such that the coupon can be scanned by a scanning device along a single straight line intersecting all the bars and spaces of both areas, said first coded area containing encoded information necessary for redemption of the coupon at the point of sale and matching uncoded information printed on the coupon, and said second coded area containing additional encoded information for identifying the origin of the coupon.

The additional information encoded on the second area of the coupon permits each coupon to be uniquely identified, and may contain items such as an offer number that identifes the promotion associated with the coupon, thus permitting other information, such as the periodical in which the coupon was printed, to be ascertained.

If desired, the bars included in the first coded area are longer than the bars included in the second coded area. This makes the bars in the first coded area visually distinct from the bars in the second coded area so that the two areas may be easily distinguished by an operator. Only the bars in the first coded area, identifying for example the value, manufacturer and family of products, are read at the point of sale. while both of the coded areas are read at the clearing house.

A specific embodiment of the present invention will now be described bv way of example, and not by way of limitation, with reference to the accompanying drawings in which: Figure l is a drawing of the face of a typical coupon in accordance with the present invention; Figure 2 is a block diagram of an automated point-of-sale reading apparatus usable with a coupon according to the present invention; and Figure 3 is a block diagram of an automated clearing house reading apparatus usable with a coupon according to the present invention.

Referring now to the drawings, and first with particular attention to FIGURE 1, the coupon 10 is similar to standard merchandising coupons inasfar as it contains written portions indicating the value of the coupon, the product or products for which the coupon may be redeemed and redemption restrictions, such as an expiration date. etc.

The coupon 10 has two coded areas 12 and 14 printed or otherwise disposed thereon. The area 12 is encoded in a Universal Product Code (UPC) format as described in UPC Guideline No. 22 published by Distribution Codes, Inc. of the United States of America. The Universal Product Code for coupons embodied in the area 12 is an eleven digit, all-numeric code. The first digit of the code identifies the item as a coupon, the next five digits identify the manufactur er, the following three digits identify the family of roducts for which the coupon is redeemab e and the last two digits indicate the value of the coupon. In the coupon illustrated in FIGURE 1, the first digit is a 5 which indicates to the scanning equipment that a coupon, rather than a product, is being scanned.The next five numerals 12345 indicate the manufacturer, the following three digits 130, which are typically assigned by the manufacturer, indicate the product family and the last two digits 07, indicate that the coupon is worth seven cents. This information contained in the area 12 may be utilized by a point-of-sale scanner to determine whether a coupon has been validly redeemed, and to credit the customer with the face value of the coupon.

Although the information contained in the area 12 is useful for automated coupon processing at the point of sale, the information contained in the area 12 is not sufficient to prepare a report containing the information contained in the reports presently being issued by coupon clearing houses. For this reason, the supplementary coded area 14 has been printed on the coupon adjacent the area 12. The area 14 contains the additional information required by the clearing house operation.

In the present embodiment, the area 14 is encoded in a bar code format utilizing shorter bars than those employed in the area 12. The shorter bars permit the two areas to be visually distinguished so that a supermarket clerk will be sure to scan the area 12 and not be confused as to which area contains the information required at the point of sale. Thus, if the area 12 is scanned along a line that intersects at least the area 12 but not necessarily the area 14, such as along the line 16, all of the information required at the point of sale will be obtained even though the information contained in the area 14 is not read.Also, since most scanners are responsive to start and stop codes present in the Universal Product Code, the area 12 can also be scanned at the point of sale along a line that intersects both areas, such as the line 18, and the scanning apparatus will ignore the data present in the area 14.

The area 14 need not be read since all of the information required by the point-ofsale apparatus is contained in the area 12.

However, the clearing house scanning unit must scan the coupon along a line that intersects both of the areas 12 and 14, such as the line 18, and be responsive to both areas in order to read out the data present in the area 14. Thus, all of the information necessary for a clearing house operation is obtained from the coupon 10 while maintaining the coupon compatible with present point-of-sale scanners.

While the embodiment described in the foregoing utilizes a pair of areas encoded with long and short bars to make the areas visually distinguishable, the areas may be made visually distinguishable in other ways such as by making the bars in both areas the same length but by placing the human readable alphanumeric characters below the bars in one area and above the bars in the other area (as is done in the present embodiment), or by making the second area invisible through the use of phosphors, transparent ink or other material that is invisible to the huamn eye, but which can be read by the clearing house scanning equipment.Alternatively, if the areas are placed in close proximity to each other, no visual distinction need be provided since it would be possible to scan both areas at the point of sale without additional effort, and the information contained in the second area would be discarded.

To illustrate the utility of a coupon such as the coupon 10 illustrated in FIGURE 1, a brief description explaining how such a coupon is handled at the point of sale and in a clearing house follows. A typical point-ofsale installation, such as an IBM 3660 described in a manual entitled "IBM 3660 Supermarket System: Introduction (GA 273076)". is illustrated in FIGURE 2, but the functional blocks illustrated in FIGURE 2 are common to other supermarket equipment and it is intended that the coupons being described be usable with other supermarket equipment capable of decoding the Universal Product Code.

In a typical installation a scanner 20, which may be a stationary scanner or a manually operated pencil shaped scanner, first scans all of the products purchased by a customer and enters the codes printed on the products in a memory 22. The codes are then transferred from the scanner 20 to the memory 22 through a terminal 24 which also has provisions for manually entering prices via a keyboard. An output of the terminal 24 is used to drive a printout and display unit 26 that prints out and displays the identity and price of each product.

After all of the products purchased by the customer have been scanned, any coupons to be redeemed are also scanned along a line that intersects at least the area 12 such as the previously discussed lines 16 and 18 to retrieve the information stored in the area 12. The information contained in the area 12 is passed to a comparator 28 via the terminal 24. The terminal 24 causes the contents of the memory 22 to be applied to the comparator 28 to determine whether a product corresponding to any one of the family of products defined by the family code present at positions 7 through 9 of the area 12 had been purchased. The family of products defined by each family code is stored in the memory.If any one of these products has been purchased, the comparator indicates that the coupon has been validly redeemed, and causes the terminal 24 to print out and display the value of the coupon and the associated product on the printout and display unit 26. It should be noted that since the family code contained in positions 7 through 9 represent an entire family of products, such as various flavors of a particular product contained in various sized packages, the code permits the coupon 10 to be redeemed upon the purchase of any one of that family of products. In the event that no product in the family of products had been purchased, the comparator 28 indicates to the terminal 24 that the redemption attempt is invalid, and the coupon is not redeemed.Prior art systems limit the redemption of a coupon to a single product, since these systems require the Universal Product Code on the coupon exactly to match the Universal Product Code on the product. Of course, if the comparison feature is not desired, the system can be modified merely to read the area 12 and to display the data contained therein.

A scanning installation usable in clearing house operations is illustrated in FIGURE 3. Such a scanning installation not need a comparator similar to the comparator 28 used in the point-of-sale scanning installation because the function of a clearing house operation is to read and identify each coupon and to tabulate the numbers of each type of coupon redeemed. No provision for determining whether the coupon had been properly redeemed at the point of sale can or need be provided. The function of the clearing house scanning installation is only to retrieve information from the coupons so that client reports can be prepared and forwarded to the appropriate manufacturers.

The scanning installation of FIGURE 3 employs a scanner 30 which may be similar to the scanner 20. As in the case of the scanner 20, the scanner 30 may either be a stationary scanner over or under which the coupon 10 is passed or manually operated pencil shaped scanner. In either case, the scanner 30 must be passed over a scanning line such as the line 18 that crosses both the area 12 and the area 14. The output signal from the scanner 30 is applied to a terminal and central processing unit (CPU) 32 which controls a memory 34 and a printout unit 36.

As the scanner 30 scans each coupon. the manufacturer and family of products is obtained by addressing appropriate locations in the memory 34 as indicated by the manufacturer and family codes contained in the area 12. In addition. the offer number contained in the area 14 addresses a memory location containing certain information desired by the manufacturer, such as, but not limited to, the periodical and issue in which the coupon appeared. As each coupon is thus scanned, data representative of the total number and total value of the coupons is accumulated and subsequently printed out in tabular form by the printout unit 36 to provide a report indicating the number and value of each coupon, together with the product family information and the origin of each coupon. The reports are then sent to the appropriate manufacturers.Consequently, the coupon need be handled only once during the tabulating process, thus eliminating the duplication in handling present in a manual operation.

WHAT WE CLAIM IS: 1. A coupon for use in merchandising and having a monetary value when exchanged for specified goods, the coupon being characterised by having printed or otherwise disposed thereon first and second coded areas encoded in a machine readable code and comprising a plurality of elongated bars and spaces of different widths, said areas being arranged such that the coupon can be scanned by a scanning device along a single straight line intersecting all the bars and spaces of both areas, said first coded area containing encoded information necessary for redemption of the coupon at the point of sale and matching uncoded information printed on the coupon, and said second coded area containing additional encoded information for identifying the origin of the coupon.

2. A coupon as claimed in claim 1 in which the bars included in the first coded area are longer than the bars included in the second coded area.

3. A coupon as claimed in claim 1 or 2in which said first and second coded areas each have human readable alphanumeric characters associated therewith, the human readable alphaumeric characters associated with one of said areas being disposed below said area, and the human readable alphanumeric characters associated with other of said areas being disposed above said area respectively.

4. A coupon as claimed in any preceding claim in which the first coded area is encoded in the Universal Product Code.

5. A coupon for use in merchanising and having a monetary value when exchanged for specified goods substantially as hereinbefore described with reference to Figure 1 of the accompanying drawings.

**WARNING** end of DESC field may overlap start of CLMS **.

Claims (5)

**WARNING** start of CLMS field may overlap end of DESC **. memory. If any one of these products has been purchased, the comparator indicates that the coupon has been validly redeemed, and causes the terminal 24 to print out and display the value of the coupon and the associated product on the printout and display unit 26. It should be noted that since the family code contained in positions 7 through 9 represent an entire family of products, such as various flavors of a particular product contained in various sized packages, the code permits the coupon 10 to be redeemed upon the purchase of any one of that family of products. In the event that no product in the family of products had been purchased, the comparator 28 indicates to the terminal 24 that the redemption attempt is invalid, and the coupon is not redeemed.Prior art systems limit the redemption of a coupon to a single product, since these systems require the Universal Product Code on the coupon exactly to match the Universal Product Code on the product. Of course, if the comparison feature is not desired, the system can be modified merely to read the area 12 and to display the data contained therein. A scanning installation usable in clearing house operations is illustrated in FIGURE 3. Such a scanning installation not need a comparator similar to the comparator 28 used in the point-of-sale scanning installation because the function of a clearing house operation is to read and identify each coupon and to tabulate the numbers of each type of coupon redeemed. No provision for determining whether the coupon had been properly redeemed at the point of sale can or need be provided. The function of the clearing house scanning installation is only to retrieve information from the coupons so that client reports can be prepared and forwarded to the appropriate manufacturers. The scanning installation of FIGURE 3 employs a scanner 30 which may be similar to the scanner 20. As in the case of the scanner 20, the scanner 30 may either be a stationary scanner over or under which the coupon 10 is passed or manually operated pencil shaped scanner. In either case, the scanner 30 must be passed over a scanning line such as the line 18 that crosses both the area 12 and the area 14. The output signal from the scanner 30 is applied to a terminal and central processing unit (CPU) 32 which controls a memory 34 and a printout unit 36. As the scanner 30 scans each coupon. the manufacturer and family of products is obtained by addressing appropriate locations in the memory 34 as indicated by the manufacturer and family codes contained in the area 12. In addition. the offer number contained in the area 14 addresses a memory location containing certain information desired by the manufacturer, such as, but not limited to, the periodical and issue in which the coupon appeared. As each coupon is thus scanned, data representative of the total number and total value of the coupons is accumulated and subsequently printed out in tabular form by the printout unit 36 to provide a report indicating the number and value of each coupon, together with the product family information and the origin of each coupon. The reports are then sent to the appropriate manufacturers.Consequently, the coupon need be handled only once during the tabulating process, thus eliminating the duplication in handling present in a manual operation. WHAT WE CLAIM IS:

1. A coupon for use in merchandising and having a monetary value when exchanged for specified goods, the coupon being characterised by having printed or otherwise disposed thereon first and second coded areas encoded in a machine readable code and comprising a plurality of elongated bars and spaces of different widths, said areas being arranged such that the coupon can be scanned by a scanning device along a single straight line intersecting all the bars and spaces of both areas, said first coded area containing encoded information necessary for redemption of the coupon at the point of sale and matching uncoded information printed on the coupon, and said second coded area containing additional encoded information for identifying the origin of the coupon.

2. A coupon as claimed in claim 1 in which the bars included in the first coded area are longer than the bars included in the second coded area.

3. A coupon as claimed in claim 1 or 2in which said first and second coded areas each have human readable alphanumeric characters associated therewith, the human readable alphaumeric characters associated with one of said areas being disposed below said area, and the human readable alphanumeric characters associated with other of said areas being disposed above said area respectively.

4. A coupon as claimed in any preceding claim in which the first coded area is encoded in the Universal Product Code.

5. A coupon for use in merchanising and having a monetary value when exchanged for specified goods substantially as hereinbefore described with reference to Figure 1 of the accompanying drawings.