Sitting in the corner all alone

Why do some companies miss a trick? Why do marketers spend a lot of time and effort coming up with clever campaign concepts only to fail in the delivery? On the social web there is a huge opportunity to encourage people to share your ideas across their networks, provided you give them good reason to. Encouraging people to talk for you doesn't always require a financial incentive, though that is indeed the usual fare. However a quid pro quo is desireable - you scratch my back etc.

My irritation comes this week from what I think was a great piece of marketing poorly executed. The brand is Brora, the concept an Easter Egg Hunt launched via email. The email invited me to their website to hunt for easter eggs hidden on pages; there are 15 in total to collect awarding a maximum discount of 15% off your order.

On closer inspection, there was no obvious route to finding the eggs and no hints/tips to channel people to find the mother load. The landing page explaining the hunt was bland and unengaging. The eggs, when found, were easy to see and there was a nicely delivered splash page showing your new egg being added to the basket and the total eggs collected. 

However, there are 15 eggs to collect to get the full 15% discount. Firstly, 15 eggs is a lot to collect when you are not giving people any clues how to find them and they all exist on separate pages. Secondly, 15% is not a great offer anymore - anything less than 20% seems an offense! So, in my opinion  this is a really cute piece of marketing that has failed to ask the killer question - will my customers find it easy to use and will they be excited? Of course, that is my take, hopefully for Brora it will prove successful but could it have been even more successful if the execution has been smarter?

Bringing it back to the general social theme of my blog, what do I think they should have done?

1. Encourage sharing - use a standard "send-to-friend" service in the email - why are they not using such a basic tool to get more people involved?
2. Provide social bookmarking in the email so that people could post the content to their networks - Easter is abput friends & family, so encourage people to spread the word
   
3. Reward people for spreading the content virally - why not offer anyone who sends the email to X friends a bonus Y% off their order? Or free delivery. Or a free gift.
   
4. Get online and get people excited about it!! Now this is supposition but I think there will have been zero online PR for this campaign - there should have been some content syndicated to raise awareness & the offer driven via channels such as the affiliate base
   

I guess my main point here is that people undersell themselves too easily and don't think laterally. A promotion is as effective as the interest of your customers and you limit the scope of involvement if you just send an email and put up a new homepage - you have to put all your eggs in one basket!

What do you think? Go to the Brora homepage and follow the instructions: do you get bored after the first 5 eggs and give up or does it really work for you? Please post comments, I welcome other viewpoints.