Responsible for 14 out of the 21 marketing initiatives that
his company was running simultaneously Maurice the Marketing Manager sat in his
office twiddling with one of the promotional
pens that someone in the buying department has ordered. Maurice knew that the company he worked for,
which dealt in co-ownership, freehold and holiday ownership property in various
countries of the world expected great things from its marketing
department.
Certain resentment had been insinuating its way into
Maurice’s mind over the past few months.
He was expected to make his 14 marketing programs work yet he had no
control over the purchasing of tools to do the job. When he’d brought this up in the last marketing
meeting, stating that at the very minimum the company should be using good
quality promotional pens, he was told that “a bad workman always blames his
tools.” He’d even demonstrated how easy
it was for the cheap promotional pens
they were using to break by gripping one in his hand and using his thumb to
snap it. The response to that was that
no one would hold a pen in that way and in any event they had been really cheap
so hadn’t cut into the marketing budget too much. “Exactly my point”, Maurice grumbled heading
back to his office.
The Marketing Director of Global C.O.N.S. Ltd, Gerald
Lightfinger, had once been a Butlins Redcoat.
Maurice had no idea how Gerald had met the American owners of the
company but he’d joined Global as a sales manager and then, due to his
outstanding sales abilities, had been promoted to Marketing Director. On the day that promotion took effect the
company lost an excellent head of sales and created a poor Marketing Director
but Gerald managed to overcome his inadequacies by making sure that the blame
for anything that went wrong fell firmly and squarely on the shoulders of
Maurice, his marketing manager.
The name of the company had been Gerald’s idea too,
convincing the Americans that British people would associate C.O.N.S. with its
non abbreviated name of Condominiums on Nice Sites. Before Maurice had been employed Gerald had
tried one or two things to create particular interest in the company’s
timeshare developments.
Marketing Campaign 1 had been an unmitigated disaster
although had Gerald been an experienced marketer it could have succeeded. He released thousands of helium filled
balloons in the company colours of blue and yellow into the air over Royston in
Hertfordshire. Attached to the ribbons
on the balloons were promotional key
rings with the company details printed on them and plastic keys attached. At the same time a radio campaign was running
describing how these balloons were going to be released on a certain day and
that if one of them landed in your garden you should bring the key ring with
key into the company head office in Royston and you would be given a prize.
What Gerald hadn’t thought about was that these balloons
would not just land in Royston, indeed they landed in all sorts of places
including gardens nationwide, some fell in the sea and caused the company all
sorts of problems with conservationists and some rose so high that air traffic
control went bananas as the balloons got tangled on plane wings and on one
occasions narrowly missed being sucked into an aircraft engine.
The company’s switchboard was jammed with callers all
wanting to trade in their promotional
key rings for prizes, not to mention complaints from electricity and
telephone service providers about the balloons being entangled on their
wires. You’d be surprised what can
happen when you release 250,000 balloons into the sky. Several attached themselves to the flagpole
at Buckingham Palace which didn’t go down to well.
Gerald couldn’t believe the amount of callers and apparently
strutting around the office dismissed the complaints and concentrated on his
enormous success in getting people to call in to claim the prizes.
The prizes were all the same - 4 days inspection trip to
Tenerife in the company’s flagship timeshare development in Las Americas. However, many of the callers wanted to know
what the prize was before making a trip to Royston to trade in their promotional key rings. One in particular, from France was insistent
on knowing. Gerald advised all the
telesales staff to tell them that they had won a 4 day break in Tenerife and he
then set about buying bulk tickets from airlines.
Having purchased thousands of tickets, people started to
arrive for the trade in. Some had made
appointments and others just arrived randomly.
In true Butlins Redcoat style Gerald herded them into a room for the 2
hour “holiday ownership” sales pitch. In
a 3 month period he only managed to book 100 people out to Tenerife and lost
the company thousands of pounds as his bulk airline ticket deal expired. There were some pretty angry people too, who
had travelled all sorts of distances to get to Royston and left the office with
one of the company’s cheap promotional
pens instead of a 4 day break in Tenerife.
When they found out they were expected to purchase timeshare they just
didn’t want to go.
Join us next week for the next thrilling instalment with
more blunders from Gerald and Maurice’s determination to be recognised for his
achievements.
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