Category: Portland marketing

3rd-Party Marketing Partners: Proceed With Caution

Gift-with purchase programs can be very effective, but can also be expensive and cumbersome to administer. So it can be very attractive when a third party offers to take care of all the fulfillment details.

The downside is that if the third party screws up, it’s your reputation that suffers.

According to the Oregonian, La-Z Boy Furniture Galleries offered $250 in gas rebates with a qualifying purchase. The rebates were to be handled by a Florida company. About 700 customers took advantage of the offer last summer, and at least 100 complained that they didn’t get their rebates.

On Feb. 12, the Florida Attorney General sued the gas redemption company for unfair and deceptive business practices. The company operates under a variety of names and Web sites, including Tidewater Marketing Global Consultants, though Portland-area customers likely would recognize the addresses used in a handful of local retailer and marketing offers, including the La-Z-Boy deal, as FreeGasCentral.com or GasolineRedemption.com.

Although the store had contracted with the Florida company in good faith, customers held La-Z Boy Furniture Gallery responsible when they didn’t get what they were promised. And to their credit, the store has accepted that responsibility.

Although the deal worked for some customers, [Regional Sales Manager Mark] Yohn said, La-Z-Boy has taken over the reimbursement program.

Customers who haven’t had luck redeeming their gas receipts can contact any of the six Portland-area stores. La-Z-Boy also will refund the $5 customers spent to get the program started, he said, and reimburse those customers’ gas receipts as they are mailed in.

So the story ends well for La-Z Boy customers. It’s likely an expensive lesson for the store: whenever you’re approached by a third party for a promotion, check ’em out carefully.

A side note for Portland businesses — the state of Oregon amended several consumer protection rules about a year ago, and now tightly restricts the circumstances under which you can offer a gift with purchase.

It’s called the “Free Rule”, and I’ve got a copy of it at my desk. You might be surprised at what’s legal in Oregon and what’s not — email me here and I’ll be happy to send you a copy.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

The Elephant In the Room

I’ve written a couple of times recently (here and here) on marketers who have successfully addressed economic worries in their marketing.

Today, Laura Oppenheimer picks up the topic in the Oregonian. It’s a delicate balancing act:

“If you can figure out a smart way to deal with the elephant in the room, it actually will be a win for you,” says Doug Garnett, founder of Portland’s Atomic Direct agency and an advertising professor at Portland State University. “But that’s where you have to be really careful.”

He compares the advertising climate to 2001, after the terrorist attacks. Companies wanted to acknowledge the national mood but risked coming across as if they were capitalizing on tragedy.

Oppenheimer’s article salutes national companies Hyundai (whose Hyundai Assurance program I’ve covered elsewhere), Denny’s and Budweiser, along with a Portland personal trainer offering a discount-rate “stimulus package”.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

Current Events Mean Marketing Opportunity — An Example

According to Nancy Gibbs in Time Magazine,

Trinity Place [a restaurant and bar in Manhattan’s Financial District] offers $3 drinks at happy hour any day the market goes down, with the slogan “Market Tanked? Get Tanked! — which ensures a lively crowd at the closing bell.”

This not only aligns the establishment’s marketing with something already on their customers’ minds — it also turns a negative into a potential positive. People who might otherwise hide their wallets after a bad day on Wall Street now have a built-in excuse to spend extra money.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

The Call-to-Action: Make It Easy For the Prospect

When you deliver an advertising message to a group of prospects, you have a short period of time to convince that prospect to take action — pick up the phone, log onto a web site, or walk into a store. If they take the action and don’t get what you promised them, you’ve lost the opportunity to build a business relationship.

Today, I caught a hole in a client’s sales funnel — a disconnect in the call-to-action.

This new client is starting an advertising campaign on several radio stations, including mine on Monday. I wasn’t involved in creating the campaign; a competitor is doing that. The commercial we received on Friday afternoon drives prospects to a web site, with the ultimate goal of getting those prospects to attend an Open House.

Unfortunately, the information about the Open House wasn’t on the home page when I looked at it this morning. It was on another page on the site, but anyone coming to the site would have no way of knowing that. The danger, of course, was that even if the radio commercial “worked” — by getting people to log onto the site — it wouldn’t WORK unless looking at the site caused people to come to the Open House.

Prospects would have entered the sales funnel, and fallen out before buying.

The good news is that somebody did a little advance legwork, caught the disconnect, and notified the client. The client immediately made arrangements to fix the website, and all will be ready when the radio starts on Monday.

I’ll end with a little sales pitch: this is just one of the subjects covered in my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them, which you can still get at no charge by clicking here.

So, click here, already.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

Best Blow-Off I’ve Heard In a While

When one of your duties is to call complete strangers on the phone, you tend to hear a lot of excuses as to why now isn’t a good time to meet. After a while, the excuses all tend to sound the same.

I heard a new one this morning:

“I’m just killing snakes as fast as I can kill ’em, and the water’s rising.”

I think this meant he’s too busy to get together.

 

________________________________________________________________________

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.