British novelist Dorothy
Sayers, who actually worked in advertising in real life, explained the basic
issues in her 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise. Unless the company running the promotion requires its customers
to pay a “shipping and handling” fee – which dramatically lowers the
effectiveness of the promotion – the company will have to pay for verifying the
participating applications, buying and warehousing the “prizes,” and shipping
the goods to the customer out of its advertising budget. The problem becomes
how many additional sales the company will realize as a result of the
promotion, and how much of the resulting profits they are willing to spend. Too
many prizes, or too much value per prize unit, and the costs will eat any
resulting increase in profits; too few prizes or too little value per prize
unit and no one will participate in the promotion. And that doesn’t even
consider aspects like fraud, forgery, or potential damage to the company’s
brand identity…
In the original “Pepsi Stuff”
promotion the company had to contend with all of these problems and then some.
Much of what they were offering did indeed consist of cheap promotional materials
for which an absurd amount of “proof-of-purchase” was required, and the few
attempts at prizes with an intrinsic value ended up causing trouble, as in the
case where a “joke” offering of a Harrier jump-jet resulted in a lawsuit from
someone who claimed to have been deceived by the offer of a $30 million
military jet for the equivalent of about $750,000 cash. The Coca-Cola people
appeared to be watching the whole situation with glee, and wasted no time
running their own ads mocking the Pepsi promotion, before starting their own
version 10 years later…
Over time, the Coke version
of the promotion grew unfeasibly expensive and began causing the company other
problems, until they gradually converted it into recruiting for
customer-generated content on Twitter about a year ago. I was therefore not particularly
surprised to see a relaunch of the Pepsi Stuff program at the beginning of
2018. If the previous iterations are anything to go by, we should expect to see
the Pepsi version end in another six to eight months, with everything you’d
actually want going out of stock by the end of this summer. Meanwhile, the Coke
ads mocking the new Pepsi version should launch sometime in the next month or
so. It will be interesting to see if Coke bothers to create new ads of mockery,
or if it just dusts off the old ones and starts airing them again. It will also
be interesting to see if they re-launch their own version of it again around
2028 or so…
Now, I’d be the first to
admit that I’m not clear on what either of these companies think they’re going
to accomplish by using and re-using a promotion style that was old before most
of their present customers were born. It’s true that all of the
proofs-of-purchase are electronic these days, based on codes entered online,
and it’s also true that modern automated fulfillment systems take most of the
labor expenses out of the equation. And if there has been any reduction in the
appeal of getting something for nothing, or in the number of people who are naïve
enough to believe that you can get something for nothing, news of the decline
has yet to make it to Central Michigan. But I can’t help thinking that unless
somebody comes up with a new idea for a product promotion this whole cycle will
just keep coming around again…
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