Keep that till slip or miss out

03 October 2016 - 10:03 By Wendy Knowler
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Why do companies run competitions?

Because of what's in it for them - your personal information, increased sales in the case of on-pack promotions, increased "hits" on their social media sites, and a boost to their brand.

Before the Consumer Protection Act came into effect five years ago companies could also make huge amounts of money out of charging consumers premium SMS rates to enter their competitions.

The act put an end to that, capping the cost of such SMSes at R1.50. It also stopped competition organisers from forcing winners to be present at the prize draw and pose for cheesy promotional "happy grateful winner" photos. Now if you don't want to, you don't have to - and you still get your prize.

In the case of "pick me" competitions on what the industry calls fast-moving consumer goods, competition stickers act as a lure to drive sales.

In the past there've been many cases of companies and their promotional agents not exactly covering themselves in glory with such on-pack competitions.

Believe it or not, one ran a competition on a range of canned goods with the terms and conditions printed on the back of labels stuck to the can. So only when buyers removed the label did they discover that, to enter, they had to buy three variants of the product.

And it used to be common practice not to make the closing date of the competition visible to consumers, resulting in many buying the product because of the competition only to find out later that it had long closed. Shocking!

But that doesn't happen any more.

What does happen quite a lot, it seems, is that people "win", only to have their excitement turn to disappointment and anger when they are told to produce proof of purchase and they can't.

Remember, these are grocery items, not TV sets, so the chances of someone discarding the sales slip are huge.

So it follows that the "keep your slip" advice ought to be extremely hard-to-miss in the competition promos, right? No, in many cases it's not on the pack but buried in the terms and conditions of the competition, somewhere online.

Koketso Bantobetse was told she'd forfeited her prize - a tablet - in Cadbury's "Wondermunchful" SMS competition recently when she couldn't produce a till slip for her winning chocolate bar entry. She had proof of buying a Lunch Bar at around the time of her entry, but not for the winning PS Caramilk.

A spokesman for the organisers said proof of purchase was a must "from a corporate governance and responsibility perspective" because it "ensures that the promotion is run in a manner which will allow consumers to participate fairly".

Asked how the till slip requirement was communicated to consumers, she said: "All communication reflected that terms and conditions applied."

So you had to go looking for it. When I asked how many others had lost out on prizes because of the missing slips, I was told some winners had been disqualified but "similarly there have also been legitimate winners".

Happily, Bantobetse was promoted to the latter camp in the end.

"Mondelez South Africa has in good faith, and in seeing that Bantobetse is a loyal customer of the Cadbury brand, decided to award the prize to her anyway."

Erwin Moodley lost out on a R2000 prize in Twinsaver's current toilet roll competition because he, too, couldn't produce a till slip. When he complained, the competition promoters told him: "Both the promotional sticker on the product packaging, as well as the published terms and conditions, expressly state that participants must retain their proof of purchase."

So I checked out the promotion at my local Checkers, looking for the proof of purchase disclosure.

It does indeed appear on the sticker on the pack - but not on the top layer. You have to peel that off to expose the bottom layer and then only is this advice visible.

That "peeling off" is designed to happen only after purchase, by which time the consumer could well have disposed of the till slip.

So I asked the toilet paper maker: "In the interests of full transparency, why wasn't the proof of purchase warning printed in bold on the top layer?"

I hadn't received a response at the time of writing.

Companies should try harder to get the proof of purchase message across, and consumers should always find and read the small print.

CONTACT WENDY:

E-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za

Twitter: @wendyknowler

 

#Shelfie

 

GREEN MOOOVE: From today, Woolworths fridges will have very different-looking fresh milk bottles. It's the same milk, but in plastic bottles made from 30% plant-based plastic, made in Brazil from what is left of sugar cane after it is processed to make sugar. Sugar cane is a renewable energy source, unlike fossil fuels which are used to make conventional plastic. The new bottles are fully recyclable

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