Today, I received a bonus from the grocery shopping app I use, and it sounded like a pretty good deal. For example, if you redeem about 90,000 points — which is usually worth around $90 — they’ll give you $150 back. That’s an extra $60, which is pretty nice. What was interesting, though, is that I found myself wondering whether I actually wanted to spend it.
In many cases, you end up buying things you don’t necessarily need, and a lot of the items in this store are quite expensive. I might just stock up on one particular thing instead. It does make you wonder — since these deals actually come up pretty frequently, should you really rush to use them? Afterwards, something funny happened. It looked like the staff had accidentally left their marketing material on the counter, showing what next week’s sale was going to be.
For example, it said something like if you redeem 500,000 points, they’ll give you $900. It was kind of funny because if people didn’t know that ahead of time, they might have been more inclined to spend their points this week. But once they saw next week’s deal, anyone planning to redeem a large amount would probably reconsider. It’s something to think about as a consumer.
A lot of times, companies already have all their marketing materials and promotions planned out well in advance — sometimes for the whole month. It’s often just a matter of waiting it out. If you happen to see it, I suppose it’s fair game. They shouldn’t be leaving it out. And funny enough, a lot of times people actually release all this stuff online.
So, I guess it shows you as a business, you better be careful when you’re releasing your marketing materials in this way. Can you imagine if this was your Black Friday deals, for example? You got to keep it a little bit more secure.