I’m not a big fan of the lotteries. Bureaucrats see them as a form of painless tax and make generational spending plans on initial revenues that never seem to pan out.
Maybe you feel that way too.
But in marketing, what’s important is “How does my client feel?”
For many, receiving a lottery ticket is perceived as an important gesture of good will as this blogger describes.
Ankesh Kothari offers the following case study on using Lottery Tickets as a marketing/positioning tool.
Lottery Incentive
Evans Industries is a Detroit based parent companyof 7 unit companies that supply industrial
products to manufacturers and distributors in diverse markets.No distributor handled their products exclusively.
Evans had to compete with dozens of other products for their distributors’ attention. A few years back, they wanted to motivate their distributors to do a better job at selling their products. They wanted to provide their distributors an incentive to put their products ahead of all the other ones.
But they faced a problem. They didn’t have a lot of money to spend on distributors. Many of their competitors fed the distributors with a lot of gifts. A few spent thousands of dollars on the distributors. Evans didn’t have such sort of resources. So they decided to use a creative technique.
They bought a couple of hundred lottery tickets. And sent a personal letter along with the lottery ticker to each distributor telling him: “You could become millionaires either by winning the lottery, or by selling our products.�
With a $300 investment, they achieved far more than their competitors who spend $30,000 and more! This lottery campaign raised the awareness of their products with the distributors.
None of the distributors actually won the lottery. But many of them did sell a lot more of Evans products.
Action Summary:
* Send a lottery ticket to clients, suppliers, employees. It doesn’t cost much. But people perceive it to be very valuable.
* Every one gets free pens and post-it notes from big companies. But who receives lottery tickets? Send something that no one else does, and you will instantly stand out.
* While giving gifts, remember: it’s not how much it costs you. It’s about how valuable the
gift is in the eyes of the receiver.
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