This dollar is not that dollar---Do you want a free $75 gas card from Dockers?

This coming weekend (6/7/2008) is Father’s Day. To celebrate this once-a-year holiday, SearsMen’s Dockers Father's Day event from June 7^th to 15^th, where customers will get a $75 shell gas gift card when they spend $100 or more on any Men's Dockers merchandise (excluding shoes). Not only will daddy get free gasoline, but they will also automatically enter into a sweepstake to win a 2008 Toyota Prius will hold an in-store with a suggested retail price of $21,100! And meanwhile, the qualified customers will also get a $10 gift card given out by Sears. So in total it is $85 back. Do you think this deal is attractive?

Actually it is not the first time Levi Strauss & Co. has promoted its Dockers brand merchandise by giving away free stuff. In the same period last year, they had a “buy $100 Dockers Men’s Merchandise and get free 2-night-hotel stay” event at Kohl’s department stores. Amazingly, at that time they even put several luxury hotels located at Times Square NY on the list of hotels which are eligible for redemption for this free offer. Usually, a one night stay in that kind of hotel will cost more than $200. With such offers, how can Dockers possibly turn a profit from their $100 pants sale? The trick is that both Dockers (Levi Strauss & Co.) and Kohl’s were not responsible for the offer redemption. Instead, Dockers just needed to pay small amount of money, sign a contract, and assign this promoting job to a third company which was in charge of the entire process of offer redemption. In this specific case, that company is TLC marketing, a company located in Boston. In order to make this business profitable, TLC marketing had to make the offer redemption process sufficiently complicated so that only less than 30~40% of customers would successfully get the offer redeemed. First, they divided the mail-in rebate into two steps. In the first step they asked the customers to send in all the required information to get a hotel reservation voucher. In the second step, they asked the customers to make a hotel reservation by providing 3 preferred hotels and 3 possible dates on the voucher and send it back for further confirmation. Since TLC marketing only want to pay cheapest price with hotel chains, it is impossible for them to provide all the customers with the most popular hotel in the peak season. So they needed to make their customers’ schedule flexible so that they can try to fit them in the cheapest hotel slot they find. This deal may be great for people with bunch of free time or retired senior people. But if you have a full time job, how flexible could your schedule be? Even if you have the time, TLC marketing may fail to fulfill your offer for no reason. They can simply not give you any response. Some customers finally got their hotel redemption after calling them everyday or filling complaints at BBB. Others are still waiting for their hotel reservation confirmation with passed reservation dates, even though the promotion event has already finished for almost a year.

For the coming Dockers sale event, we don’t know which company is responsible for the promotion. But no matter which company it is, it will definitely not give out $75 gas cards to everyone who buys into the promotion. In order to increase the redemption breakage, they will either not respond to legitimate offer redemptions, or they will limit gas stations where the cash card can be used, either to gas stations which sell over-priced gasoline or are located 100 miles away from where you live. Cash is accepted everywhere. Gift cards will never trade for the equivalent amount of cash because they always come with limits for usage. Still, even though a gift card is worth less than its cash value, it is better than nothing. If by any chance you really need some men’s wear recently, why not take advantage of this Dockers Father’s Day event. Regardless of whether you actually get the promised gift card, Dockers do make reasonably good pants. And if you shop at Sears this Father’s Day, don’t forget to use your Discover credit card, since they give 5% cash back for shopping at department stores from April 1^st to June 30^th.