Babybel – Free Space Hopper

Babybels were on offer, the kids were going back to school, so I threw a pack in my basket. That’s when I noticed the free space hopper offer: purchase 4 special packs and get a  free Space Hopper! So of course I put 3 more packs in my basket. The instructions said to go to www.babybelspacehoppers.co.uk and key in the codes from each pack, so off I went. The website was in Flash, for very little purpose. Nothing loaded at all on the iPhone, just a blue gradation.

The application form was easy to find – I just clicked on ‘Claim your free Space Hopper’. The form fields were pre-populated with the title of the field. Although this isn’t in itself necessarily bad practice, the pre-population should be deleted when the user clicks on the field. In this case, the user was expected to select and delete it, and this is a big ask. There was a ‘please confirm your postal code’ field – the first time I’ve ever seen one of those. It’s best to collect the smallest amount of data possible: every extra field is another barrier for the consumer.

Anyway, I soon entered the data and the four codes, and I quickly received an email telling me that a Space Hopper was on its way to me.

The rest of the microsite is a bit more problematic. There’s a button for an ad that doesn’t exist yet (coming soon). There’s a link that offers you more information about the Space Hopper Games, but it just opens a Facebook events page. The user has to then select the correct event. Why not open the correct event immediately? Then there’s the ‘Like’ button on the home page. Contrary to what you would expect, this ‘Like’ button doesn’t let you become a Facebook fan of the site or brand. It simply links you through to the Facebook events page. Considering the amount of emphasis being placed on Facebook, you might think that Facebook was a big part of Babybel’s marketing strategy. But the page has only 287 fans, and there are only 2 days worth of posts from the Babybel Community Manager.

Looking forward to getting our Space Hopper though!