Bailie.com

Monday, December 04, 2006

Some companies just don’t get it when it comes to marketing

I got an interesting - useless, mind you, but an interesting spin on useless - offer in my inbox today. My mobile phone service provider wants to give me a shopping bag with their logo splashed on it. Well, if I drive to one of their stores, they’ll give me one, for FREE!! (I wish I knew how to make this blink and twirl like a bad marquee). I gather that by “free,” they will give me one even if I don’t buy one of the phones they’re pushing as holiday gifts to put into the bag so that I can walk around advertising their phones.

I understand that it’s supposed to be a clever promotional gimmick, and I can see one of their used-to-be-a-union-job marketers spinning in their swivel chair and sucking on a pen, wondering how to get the message out there, and thinking, most people just take the bag home and toss it, but if we can get people to re-use the bags for a month or so, that’s a lot of free advertising during a slow season. So how do we make them think of the bag as a commodity and not just a tossable receptacle? I know, people love free stuff. We’ll give them a bag, and stress that it’s free. I know you have that same picture in your mind.

Is it any wonder this doesn’t work? If the mental model (in other words, the general way we’ve come to expect that things work in the world) is that you go into a store and the retailer gives you a bag, for free, to put your stuff in, then what’s the commercial value of a shopping bag? Why would I want to come all the way to your store to pick up what’s basically advertising material? To walk around advertising your product for you, for free? Heck, you should pay me to advertise your stuff for you, and don’t be expecting me to have to come pick it up from you, either.

This is a typical example of poor user experience, and says to me one of two things, either that the company is grasping as straws to have some sort of promotional campaign with no budget (as in “oh oh, the company is in financial trouble") or that this is a company that just doesn’t get it (as in “out of touch with reality"). I don’t know which it is, and I don’t have the energy to really investigate, but it does make me wonder.