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Bill Hanifin
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Some days things just come together. I woke up remembering that it was my Mom’s birthday this week and received a serendipitous email from 1-800-Flowers offering me a special deal.
My eye was instantly drawn to “Free shipping and No Service Charges” as I clicked through to order some roses. After spending time looking for the just the right arrangement, I completed the order form, entered the promotion code and clicked “Submit”. To my surprise, I received a message informing me that my item selected was not part of the promotion.
I knew that I had been afflicted by the most dreaded and harmful diseases of Marketers – the Loyalty Asterisk™. Have a look at my earlier post describing the Asterisk. Marketers are an interesting sort – they marshal tremendous creative resource to come up with inventive promotions and offers and then undermine their hard work with annoying conditions driven by the fine print.
Consumers are desperately seeking transparency in today’s retail world. We don’t want to feel the need to call our lawyer or our neighbor who works in procurement to dissect every offer we see. It should be simple, clear, and easy to decipher.
Adopting a marketing strategy founded on transparency creates confidence. A series of confidence building transactions plant the seeds of trust. And trust is the foundation of enduring loyalty that surpasses price and service interruption. This form of emotional loyalty is the holy grail of retailers, hoteliers, and all others.
1-800-Flowers lucked out with me. After searching for flower arrangements that qualified for the promotion and being thoroughly disappointed by the selection, I reverted to the roses that I wanted most. Maybe a hurried lifestyle worked in their favor and in the end, the roses sent were beautiful by all accounts.
The longer term impact for me is to harden my shell of skepticism towards email offers and in particular this online retailer. It was certainly not the first time that I knew the “bloom was off the rose” of promotional marketing, but it does make me wonder why it is so hard to create an offer without undermining conditions.
If the offer made is financially sound, then the retailer should not be afraid to let everyone in on it. And, if the offer is so narrow that the asterisk is required, then the marketing team should go back to the garden and plant more seeds in hopes of a better crop…………Bill Hanifin
