Pointless promotions waste millions

Today's post rammed home the pointlessness of promotions used by many big brands. I got £1 worth of coupons off Tropicana Juice and Smoothies. The problem? We get through gallons of this stuff already, and have no intention of stopping soon. Tropicana is one of those brands we buy on auto-pilot:
- Juice? Tropicana. Bang. In the trolley. Next.

This promotional door drop was doubly daft:
1. The obvious waste of money on a loyal user
2. It made it blatantly obvious that Tropicana don't know a bloody thing about me as a brand user

Now, contrast this wasteful, scatter-gun approach to brand building with the premium coffee system brand Nespresso. Tropicana are at the mercy of the retailers, who DO have data on users. Nespresso, on the other hand, have a direct relationship with their 1.6 million users. They know what type of coffee they have ordered, when and for how much. So they can target their promotional activity much more effectively.

A more mainstream brand that has built a business on data mining is Pampers. The brand has an amazing data base of mums, who they communicate with as their babies reach different lifestages. "Hello Jennifer. Your baby Lucy is now 24 months and starting to crawl" [Absolutely right! And they know her name...]. "So now is the time for nappies that help Lucy crawl. Here's a free sample." [Nice, that's useful.]

As more and more of us do pretty much everything online, I think the battle for consumer data is set to become one of the biggest challenges of 21st century brand building.