Clever promotions can work wonders. Marks & Spencer, for example, set a trend that has been copied by rivals with its "dine in for £10" offer. Sales overall may be down at the retail giant, but food sales suffered less than other categories.
This week its stores were deluged with thousands of shoppers eager to snap up selected ranges for 1p, a promo that celebrated the firm's 125th anniversary by harking back to its origins as a penny bazaar. However, the shelves cleared so quickly that many customers who'd queued for hours were left empty-handed and disappointed, illustrating the perils posed by promotions that are not so much too good to be true, as too good to be true for very long. Such incidents always bring to mind Hoover's costly free flights fiasco from the early 1990s.
Closer to home, I wonder if Kingsdown Printing's offer of free press time to new customers will prove to be a stroke of genius or a moment of madness. There's no shortage of free print on offer in general - think Vistaprint with its teaser offer of free business cards to rope in punters. Just pay for processing and postage. Oh and £7.99 for advanced editing... it's easy to see how that initial "free" ultimately works to Vistaprint's advantage.
Five hours of free press time is a rather more substantial carrot, and I'm not surprised it has excited considerable comment and some frothing at the mouth on PrintWeek's forums. The small print on this particular deal would make interesting reading. Hopefully Kingsdown has thought it through carefully and considered all the implications, not least the potential for alienating existing customers.
