It once again confirmed that online offers have to be so carefully thought about, and managed. 

Asda was forced to apologise to customers after a fault with its website resulted in £75 being discounted from their online bills. On Saturday evening the offer was posted and open to every first-time online shopper and word of this quickly spread. Customers who had taken advantage of the deal were then contacted on Sunday morning to inform them of the error and told they would actually have to pay the full price for their order or cancel and return the goods.

 
Asda will no doubt be counting the financial and PR cost of this blunder but it underlines the importance of assessing the risk of any online promotion. Not so long ago voucher promotions were distributed to the customer via direct mail, newspapers and in-store and a recipient of one of these offers would probably tell a few friends and there it would end. Now with the advent of the internet and the speed of which we can share knowledge with our friends and social groups a sales promotion can reach a massive audience in a very short time. This is where the danger lies!
 
Only recently a TV advertising campaign ran in the interval of Coronation Street directing people to a website to redeem a very attractive offer. By 10pm the website had crashed due to the amount of visitors to the site (30m in two hours!). What the brand hadn’t accounted for was the way in which those viewers passed on this information and to how many. We have to remember that we all now hold our own databases and connect with these people regularly so why wouldn’t we tell our ‘internet friends’ about something that could save them money – after all we are friends!

Of course, Asda had no intention of giving away £75 on a one-shop purchase, but what it exemplifies perfectly is the speed at which messages migrate. Brands now need to really look very closely at the way they utilise the Internet for promotional activity and put in place the right cover against over redemption. There are many different ways in which a brand can protect themselves such as capping the amount of people that can apply for the offer and restricting the forwarding ability of the offer to other people. Inevitably, there will always be a few who will have the ability to find a loop hole enabling the copy and paste of such coupons but at least if the brand is aware of these pitfalls then they can protect against it.

As we say at Mando ‘risk is good’ and it is! Clients get far more out of their risk management advisors if they are brought into the discussions early in the campaign’s development. We are here to advise on how a mechanic can be tweaked to bring it into the client’s budget without an effect on the overall headline offering. We can look at the impact of moving the redemption element on line rather than via post, or of giving the consumer a time window within which to claim.

Mando works across so many different promotional platforms and industries, which means we can view pitch ideas and marketing plans in a very different perspective from the client’s. The client is probably, and rightly, focussed on sales and positioning. We work with risk everyday; it’s pretty much all we do.

Ultimately, any risk assessor needs to question the brand’s brief and work through the customer journey to thoroughly ensure they have identified and valued the risk at every level. To use a risk management company solely as an insurer is to waste the resources they hold. Without pre campaign analysis these horror stories will continue and brands will be making enemies of their customers rather than real advocates.