Mary Dillon
Analyst · William Blair.
Well, yes, I would say a couple of things. One is that this is not a dramatic wholesale pullback on discounts. We're doing it carefully, I think smartly. What we're doing is looking at frequency and depth of circulation, of price-related discounts, but reducing that. But on the flipside, really leveraging our CRM platform and our loyalty program to incent our guests in a more personalized and targeted, we think, more effective and efficient way, right. So it's a little hard to measure all those impacts at any one moment in time, but certainly, where we can see that play out is in ticket improvement, margin improvement. And we think that's working for us. So -- but again, I've said this before, I believe in walk before you run. So Dave Kimbell and his team are doing a lot of work around just really making sure we continue to fine-tune, test and learn, understand all the demand dynamics so that we can be -- we always need to be a value to our guests is a way to think about it. And it's -- there's no one exact way to define that. But the more relevant we can be with the offerings and then how we position those and communicate those to her, the more that value equation is less about just come in because you have a coupon or a discount. That said, a lot of our guests like our coupons and our discounts, right. So it does play out in terms of the ticket dynamic. And we think it's -- obviously, it's one of the assumptions we build into our long-range plan is that we'll continue to be able to do that. Because the other place that this plays out is that less money spent on discounting, within the context of our P&L, offers us more opportunity to spend on driving awareness and the whole new guest acquisition part of our strategy, which is, we think, an opportunity -- we know it's an opportunity as we go forward. New guests don't discover you just by accident. Sometimes they do because we've opened up a store, which is great, but we're investing and testing and learning in, actually, marketplace programs already that are about using all forms of ways to communicate, whether it's traditional or new media, to drive new guest acquisition. So some of that sort of efficiencies there will be used to drive new guest growth.