A lucky draw teaches 299,000 people that your brand doesn’t pay

Every promotion teaches your customers something. Most marketing plans only count what the winner learns.

Say 300,000 people buy your product during a campaign, find the code, and send it in. One wins a million shillings. The other 299,999 get a message that says better luck next time, or no message at all. You have created one delighted person, and a crowd who now know, from experience, that your brand does not pay.

You paid for that lesson. You paid to teach it at national scale, to exactly the people who chose you.

The losers are your best customers

This is the part that should sting. The people who lose your draw are not strangers. They are the ones who picked your pack off the shelf, paid for it, looked under the cap, and took the trouble to enter. They did everything you asked.

The next time they see a code on one of your packs, they will remember how the last one went. That is not a neutral outcome. It is a promotion that makes the next promotion work less well.

Small and certain beats large and unlikely

The usual objection is that nobody gets excited about KES 20. It is worth being precise about what excitement is for. A million-shilling prize creates excitement in the marketing meeting. What happens in the duka is that somebody buys one pack, enters, loses, and stops.

A reward that always arrives does something different. It is small, it is real, and it is immediate. It ends the purchase on a good note instead of an anticlimax, and it does that for every single person who bought.

Do that four times and you have not run a promotion. You have built a habit, and the habit has your brand’s name on it.

The same budget, spent two ways

The money does not change. What changes is how many of your customers ever see it.

• A prize pool pays out whether the campaign sold anything or not. A guaranteed reward is only paid when someone actually buys and claims.
• A draw gives you a list of winners. A guaranteed reward gives you a record of every purchase that was proven, one by one.
• A draw has nothing to say to the person who lost. A guaranteed reward gives you a reason to talk to every buyer, and something to pay them for their answer.

What it costs to stop disappointing people

Less than most brand teams expect, because you stop paying for the packs nobody scanned. Money is set aside for every code you print, and whatever is not claimed comes back to you. You pay for the purchases that happened.

And there is a quieter benefit that only shows up later. A shopper who has been paid once believes the next code. A shopper who has lost once does not.