Win a two-night stay for two at The Dorchester.
There’s no denying, that over the years, we’ve all experienced the promotions that went wrong:
• Money-off coupons going to print with a product barcode – so the cost of the product was added rather than deducted when scanned at the checkout.
• Launch of an on-pack promotion offering partner rewards without the prior agreement of the partners.
• A non-unique, unique reference code – printed on a Direct Mail piece; where the printer generated URNs starting from 0000001, but did the same for each of the mailing data sets. If the same number is given to four different customers, it’s NOT a unique customer reference number!
• The wrong one – the wrong promo code printed in a magazine, the wrong reply address, the wrong telephone number, the wrong URL, the wrong value, the wrong dates…this list goes on and on…
These were rarely down to an individual and more likely result from a catalogue of errors; all the time, effort and budget put in jeopardy over something very simple that could, and should, have been avoided. I’d like to think that over the years myself, and the teams around me, have helped to prevent a few of these.
But sometimes it’s the campaign idea itself that’s the problem. We’ve all heard about the infamous promotional marketing “disasters” that have befallen some of the biggest brands; the Hoover free flights promotion is just one which featured as an example of what NOT to do in my IPM Certificate course, and even has its own Wikipedia page – a campaign that was flawed from the very beginning.
What seems like the most amazing and unique promotion ever sounds brilliant in the concept stage (and might even get as far as planning and implementation) but there’s usually a really good reason why no-one has ever done a promotion like that before, and sometimes it’s down to those of us who deliver the solutions to provide the reality-check.
Don’t get me wrong; we love a new idea and giving our developers a new challenge is what Code String is all about. Where would the Promotional Marketing industry be without the creatively-minded folk who inspire new ways of doing things?
Consumers want to experience something new and innovative; so we’ll all keep trying, hopefully we learn from the mistakes and move forward, utilising technology that offers solutions no-one had even thought possible a few years ago to come up with the next big idea.
So why not run your idea passed our team; we’ll use all our knowledge and experience to deliver a viable solution but if it’s absolutely impossible – we will tell you!
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