Fly on the Corporate Wall
Yes, some things are still free Sophisticated marketing gimmicks can be quite enthralling, but you can't beat just giving stuff away.
US shoe-store chain Payless has set up its first outlet in Thailand – at Mega Bangna – and made friends fast by giving free footwear to the first 100 customers on November 1 and yesterday, its "soft" and official opening days.
The 101st customer wasn’t left heartbroken: Whoever arrived late could buy a pair of shoes for Bt199. This sort of thing catches fire on the social media, so the mall was mobbed even before it opened at 10am.
The give-away was not free of disappointment. The promotional material left people thinking they could get any model of shoe for Bt199, but in fact the low price applied only to some designs.
That sent a few would-be buyers home empty-handed, but most of the mob was happy and many bought a second pair of shoes at the regular price just to make the long trek to Bang Na "worthwhile".
So the promotion paid off. At least a few hundred pairs were sold within the first hour. The marketers will be weighing that against the smattering of snarky remarks posted online from disappointed commuters.
Stamp craze
Meanwhile 7-Eleven isn’t exactly "giving" customers its redeemable Bt1 stamps – you have to purchase something first – but they’ve caught on big time and the chain says it’s going to keep on handing them out, maybe forever.
The tiny stamps have been a hit from the start at the convenience stores, easy to collect and swap for products when you don’t have the cash. The design changes every year – right now there’s a stamp for each of the 77 provinces in Thailand – so some folks collect them with no intention of giving them back. (A few people have tried using them as postal stamps too, but that’s not part of the deal.)
Are they really as popular as 7-Elevent says? Apparently so, because TKS Technology, which prints the stamps, has just announced a fresh order for another billion stamps from CP All, which runs the chain in Thailand.
The first batch was supposed to last until the end of the year, but almost all of the 1.6 billion stamps have been distributed. CP shareholders must be smiling.
