Win a Holiday in Italy With Borderfields

Consumers should always be given the ability to opt in to receive marketing communications rather than being opted in automatically.

I’m quite confused about this promotion from Hammond Food Oils on its bottles of Borderfields Rapeseed Oil. The prize is a week in a Tuscan villa for 7 people, which sounds great, especially with a meal prepared by Stella Severini thrown in. However, the Borderfields brand is all about the British countryside, not Italy. Introducing Tuscany into the mix can easily lead consumers into thinking that this is an Italian oil.

To enter, I went to borderfields.co.uk/enter_comp.php and filled in the entry form. Hammond Food Oils is collecting your name, address, telephone, email and a couple of optional marketing questions. Strangely, there’s no checkbox for T&Cs and no checkbox to receive marketing information. Best practice is to allow consumers to opt in to marketing communications. This is best for consumers but is also best for brands because it helps to ensure that your marketing database is filled with people who want to be there. This tactic of ‘harvesting’ consumer details is bound to lead to spam complaints from consumers. The T&Cs themselves were quite hard to find, but they’re at borderfields.co.uk/terms.php. I was surprised to read that no purchase is necessary to enter the competition as a neck collar code is a required field in the form.

Once submitted, the ‘thank you’ page appears and the consumer journey is assumed complete, but this page should ideally used to entice the consumer into more activity and brand participation so it’s a lost opportunity just to say ‘Thank you for your submission’.