No Pain - No Grain!You probably couldn’t have failed to notice the recent NutriGrain ‘24Seven’ on-pack promotion. It certainly wouldn’t have passed you by if you log on to Chatterbox, since talk there has consisted of very little else! Hourly draws for 42 days, over a thousand £500 cash prizes, almost instant notification and payout to winners, and a prize haul of around £150,000 for Chatterboxers alone. And were we all happy? Amazingly not. In fact, this competition turned into a little adventure that clearly encapsulated and demonstrated many of the things I’ve been saying in this column since it began. A sort of ‘practical test’ if you will, to show both the good and bad sides of comping and compers.
Let’s concentrate on the positive aspects first. This was a very well-run promotion, with lots of prizes. Cash prizes in fact, our favourite! There were clearly a few problems getting promotional packs into shops at the very start, but again for the keen comper this should have been a positive benefit. A bit of extra work tracking down packs in the early days will have given you a better chance of being successful.
But on the negative side, Kellogg’s had clearly planned the promotion to push all of the right buttons in a comper’s head. This, for many people, led down the path of mass multiple entries and sleepless nights as the supposedly off-peak early hours would surely give a better chance of success. The lure of an almost instant prize notification, coupled with ever increasing winners lists on Chatterbox and elsewhere turned compers into, effectively, gamblers. The thrill of the chase stopped being fun for non-winners as they began to chase their losses – a task made easier by the sudden arrival of a plentiful supply of promotional packs halfway through the game. And, as regular readers of this column will appreciate, once this starts to happen then the problems – and the recriminations – begin.
So, what points previously covered in these articles have been well and truly hammered home by NutriGrain? Well, the main one must be to honestly appraise whether a comp is really for you. Does it fall into your “comfort zone” in terms of both the time and money that needs to be invested? Just because a comp is there, that it looks good, and that other people are successful, doesn’t make it compulsory for you to jump on the bandwagon. I appreciate that it can sometimes be difficult to look away, but you should always try your best and wait for a competition more suited to your own situation to come along.
And once you’ve decided whether to join in, it’s important to find a sensible level of participation. With something like NutriGrain, where multiple entries by the bucketload were positively encouraged, it can be so easy to lose track. Decide on a realistic budget, and stick to it. Ignore the fact that other people might be able to afford more entries than you – that’s comping, I’m afraid. And never, ever try to keep up with the comping Joneses. Trust me, this is something that you’ll never manage to do. There will always be a comper who – for whatever reason – you think is better off than you. Accept it, ignore it, and concentrate instead on your own strengths.
Be consistent – both in your own strategy AND views. With NutriGrain, there were around a thousand £500 prizes. If this had been a straightforward draw, how many entries would you have made? The format of this comp cunningly persuaded most of us to throw our usual common-sense approach out of the window, and before we knew it we were buying dozens, hundreds, even thousands of qualifiers. And all for, effectively, a £500 prize. Doubtless many of us are now reviewing the comp in the cold light of day and wondering what on earth happened. There’s a moral there somewhere!
As for being consistent in your views, by this I mean that just because somebody can afford to pay for enough NutriGrain bars to enter the comp 1,000 times (or whatever), then this is not wrong or unfair. If a person is lucky enough to win more than once then, as long as the rules allow it, good luck to them. If that person wasn’t you this time, try not to dwell on it and instead find a comp that does play to your own strengths and that you can enter lots of times (a freepost draw, for example, or a free web comp). As I’ve said plenty of times before, comping will never be a level playing field. And, even though you must bite the bullet sometimes, this is something that you must accept. The advantage will be yours one day, honest!
Plan for a comp, and put in as much effort as you can. Never forget the old comping adage: it’s funny, but the harder I work at comping, the luckier I seem to be. If you want to try to improve your chances in a particular comp then you do sometimes have to put in a bit of extra effort. In the case of NutriGrain, this will have meant sourcing promotional packs very early on, from more than one store or even town if necessary, having a few sleepless nights to take advantage of off-peak hours, buying as many packs as your budget allowed etc. But remember that your own definition of "hard work and extra effort" might be completely different to someone else's, and so you’ll still not be guaranteed success.
It’s a shame, and – I suppose – an indication of some of the people who ‘enjoy’ our hobby, that despite running an innovative promotion with a huge number of cash prizes, Kellogg’s will probably receive more brickbats than bouquets. And this, of course, will encourage them to run future comps not one jot. It always amazes me how quick some compers are to bite the hand that feeds them. Understandable and perfectly acceptable, of course, when a promoter is being deliberately obstructive or underhand, but absolutely not – in my opinion – because you’re in a jealous strop over not being chosen as a winner. That’s just sour grapes, and conveniently overlooks the fact that comping is all just one big game of swings and roundabouts, where you’ll inevitably be the beneficiary one day. And come the glorious day that your solitary prize draw entry or last minute, chestnut slogan that you didn’t post until the day after the closing date anyway wins a prize, it goes without saying that your whingeing and complaining will – as if by magic – fall silent.
The big question with NutriGrain must be – will Kellogg’s ever do it again?
Cue plaintive wailing and theatrical mopping of brows from most of us but go on, admit it, in a strange way we’re all missing it already! Personally, I think that the format of the comp – coupled with the fact that another promotion requiring mass purchases has just appeared on Pop Tarts, a similar Kellogg’s product – shows that the promoter was looking for a short, sharp increase in sales. We can only speculate on the reason – perhaps that corner of the cereal aisle that is forever ‘Kellogg’s morning products’ is under threat because of floundering sales, or a new product from a competitor – but it’s clear that they had little interest in building long-term customer loyalty with this one. They just wanted to shift units – and LOTS of them, in the shortest possible period of time. Comping history shows us that this kind of strategy is rarely sustainable beyond the occasional one-off promotion. Look at the ‘cokeauction’ comps a couple of years back, where consumers were positively encouraged to buy Coke by the case load and where you needed to have made a purchase of hundreds – if not thousands – of Coke products to win anything worthwhile. This was a sensible idea by Coke at the time, coming as it did soon after some health and contamination scares in other countries, and with the news that Pepsi was poised to take over the ‘number one cola’ spot for the first time ever, but the long term benefits were less spectacular. Customer loyalty especially was tested, as Coke’s genuine consumers found themselves blown out of the water by people willing and able to bulk-buy the product. And despite a much-trumpeted agreement between Coke and the auction website concerned to run many more similar contests over a five-year period, ‘cokeauction2’ was as far as it got before the plug was pulled just a few months later.
For a promotion to be truly successful, it needs to do more than just increase a product’s sales. It must somehow sustain that increase, improve awareness of the product generally and, most importantly, engender a loyalty for the brand. OK, us compers are admittedly a bunch of unashamed fly-by-nights who remain loyal to a product only until a competition’s closing date, so I think that promoters will always struggle with that last aspect more than they ever fully appreciate! But this, especially, is what was missing from the NutriGrain adventure and it’s this, I think – coupled with the fact that people now have enough NutriGrain bars in their homes to last a lifetime (so there could actually be a massive DIP in sales over the coming weeks and months). Will that make Kellogg’s think twice before they do it again? Only they know whether the promotion met all of their particular objectives, whatever they may have been, so who knows?
Until next time, happy comping!
Smid x
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