Great gift card marketing. Badly executed

Tuesday, 21 September 2010

The Apprentices 'sell' Carlton Hotel Giftcards 

The opening episode of The Apprentice in Ireland last night gave a glimpse into how NOT to successfully promote your gift card to your customers! Sitting in a taxi sharing a phone, doing cold calls for 3 hours got short shrift from Bill Cullen and rightly so. To say nothing of the chap (fired) who got exactly zero sales for an entire day. If this lot are the future business leaders of Ireland we’re all in trouble.

However, it did underline the key requirement for retailers and hotels and other organisations with gift cards to actively promote them just like they would promote any other product they sell. Gift cards are ultimately about recruiting new customers, so when Carlton Hotel wanted to drive sales of their gift cards in shopping centres and to sell their gift cards to businesses, what they were really trying to do is drive more customers into their hotels and then hope to retain them as lifelong clients going forward.

Gift Cards aren’t better looking vouchers – they are a superb customer recruitment tool. Use them!

EoinW