Win a Farm Holiday With Woodside Farm

Promotions that don’t require purchase shouldn’t assume that all entrants have bought the product. Bad data leads to bad marketing insights.

For my family, pancakes are all about Shrove Tuesday. The ritual of preparing the batter and frying each pancake while everybody waits expectantly and hungrily is all part of the occasion. Pancakes are a simple food to prepare fresh: milk, flour, eggs and butter with Golden Syrup and lemon. If you swap the Golden Syrup for honey then it’s a timeless and wholesome meal.

Woodside Farm has a promotion on their ready-made pancakes to win a farm holiday. So the prize fits the brand and a holiday is one of the things that consumers most want to win. The promotion is advertised on the pack by way of a sticker and the instructions say to visit win.rutlandfoods.co.uk. It turns out to be a data collection exercise with lots of marketing research questions and there’s no requirement to buy the product to enter the promotion.

Because it’s a ‘no purchase necessary’ draw, some of the marketing answers are badly constructed and can only lead to a lot of false data being collected. “How many times have you bought our pancakes?” needs a ‘never’ option or people who are only interested in the prize will have to select “This is my first time!”. “Which ones have you bought?” needs a “none” option. The following all need a “not applicable” option:

• Last time you bought our pancakes, where did you pick them up from?
• When did you use the pancakes?
• How did you heat them up?
• How would you rate them on a scale of 1-10?
• Who in your family ate the pancakes?

Most ‘no purchase necessary’ competitions will get a lot of interest from people that aren’t remotely interested in your brand, so make sure your data collection takes this into account.