Part I, The Thinking · Chapter 2

One Lead Job

The six objectives of a sales promotion, and why one must lead

Buy two, buy three

In August 2026 Electrolux put one sentence at the centre of a cashback: buy two participating Electrolux appliances in the same transaction and get fifteen per cent of the price back; buy three or more and get twenty. Nobody has ever bought a dishwasher to get cash. The offer did not exist to make anyone want an appliance. It existed to turn one appliance into two or three in a single trip, across ovens, washers, dishwashers, fridges and vacuums, in a home that is usually furnished in pieces, over years, from whoever is on promotion that month. The threshold was the job. The reward stepped up with the trade-up. The claim was a form and a receipt, which a person who has just spent a few thousand dollars will do without complaint, and which a person buying a kettle would not.

Every claim on it is a bigger basket: two or more appliances, bought in one transaction, with the receipt to prove it. How many people claimed is not ours to say; those are Electrolux’s customers and Electrolux’s numbers, and the published terms are all this book uses. But read the terms and you could not mistake what the promotion was for. The step from fifteen to twenty per cent is a sentence written to one shopper: the one already holding two appliances, deciding whether the third is worth doing now. Put the question to anyone who read the offer and you would get the same answer in the same words: a bigger basket. That is rarer than it sounds, and it is the subject of this chapter.

The wish-list brief

Here is a brief we have received, in one form or another, more times than we could count. The promotion should drive trial among people who have never bought us. It should reward the people who already do. It should lift basket size. It should collect first-party data, because the CRM team has a target. And it should make the brand feel a bit more fun, because the last campaign was a cashback and the brand team is tired of cashbacks. One mechanic, one prize pool, one eight-week window.

We do not read that as confusion. We read it as ambition, written down by people who have five things they would like to be true. The trouble is not the wanting. The trouble is that a single offer cannot send five signals to five different shoppers without blurring all of them, because the five things pull in different directions and the shopper only hears one sentence. The person who has never bought you needs the ask to be almost nothing. The CRM team needs the ask to be a form. Put both on the same pack and the stranger you most wanted is the first to walk, and the form is filled in by the people who were buying anyway.

You can see what happens when nobody settles the question by looking at what gets launched. On a morning in the middle of 2026 we counted 137 live promotions across the categories we track, and 89 of them were games of chance: 49 single prize draws and 40 instant wins. Two were cashbacks. That is not a reading of what shoppers want. It is a reading of what a finance team will sign, and of what a brand team reaches for when the promotion has not yet been told what it is for. A prize draw is the safe default. It is flexible, its cost is fixed the moment the pool is set, and it can be argued into almost any brief after the fact. Which is exactly why it ends up in so many briefs where a different mechanic would have done the actual job.

Six jobs: the objectives of a sales promotion

Over enough campaigns the wish-list sorts itself into six things a promotion can actually do, and we gave them trade names because the trade names are quicker in a meeting than the marketing words.

A Breaker does trial. It asks a stranger to abandon a brand they trust for one purchase, which is the hardest thing in marketing, and so it can afford almost no friction and no questions. The free flights in chapter 4 were a Breaker: a reason to connect with Virgin rather than the carrier you had, and the work came after the decision, not before it.

A Builder does frequency. You already have the buyer; they buy monthly and you need them weekly, or they buy at Christmas and you need them in March. The coffee card is the oldest Builder in the world and still works because the progress is visible, which is the only rule a Builder has.

[STORY NEEDED: the cereal move]

The brief names a cereal brand that moved from a gift in every pack to a gift in one pack in three. It belongs here, as the Builder story: what the every-pack gift was doing to repeat purchase, what changed when the gift became a chance, and what the numbers did. Needed from Mark: whether the brand can be named, the year, and whatever repeat or velocity figure exists in the record. Without a figure the story still works; with a figure it becomes the chapter’s best page. Client stories only from public facts, or with the client’s written permission; no client data (ruling R15).

A Loader does basket. The transaction is happening; it is too small. The Electrolux cashback above is a Loader, and so is every buy-two-get-something and every tiered cashback in whitegoods. The rule is that the reward has to feel worth more than the cost of the trade-up, and the threshold has to be one a real shopper can reach on a real trip.

A Harvester does data. If you want someone’s email, mobile and permission to keep talking, you have to pay for it, and the price is a reward big enough to make the form feel fair. Friction is unavoidable here; the generosity has to rise to meet it. A receipt-validated cashback is the quiet champion of this job, because it returns the product, the retailer, the date and the price paid, which is a plan for the next campaign rather than an email address and a stated intention.

A Keeper does loyalty. It talks to the people who already buy you, and it trades on exclusivity rather than face value. Airline status is the model, and the lesson from airline status is that the feeling of being inside counts for more than the arithmetic of what being inside is worth.

A Headliner does fame. Its job is to make the brand the thing people talk about, and the person it most needs to reach is often not in the shop at all: it is the journalist, the feed, the person at the barbecue who hears the story second-hand. Burger King sold a Whopper for a cent, but only through its app and only within six hundred feet of a McDonald’s, and the friction was the joke. Snickers in Australia got cheaper as the internet got angrier. Domino’s filled potholes to protect the pizza on the drive home. None of them would look clever judged on entries, and none of them were built to be. The rule a Headliner has is that the idea must survive being retold in one sentence by someone who did not see the ad, because a story nobody can repeat earns no coverage. And the honest line we hold it to is that fame which never finds its way back to the brand at the shelf is an advertisement, not a promotion, and should be priced like one.

Petbarn’s Leaps and Bounds promotion from chapter 1 is worth reading again with those six in mind. Forty-five dollars on the range in one transaction, member card scanned, five chances at ten thousand dollars. The threshold makes it a Loader. The member card makes every entry a record. Nobody was asked to do anything they were not already doing at the counter, and that is the detail this chapter turns on.

One leads, one may ride

The first edition of this book said pick one job and had a box called the Kill Switch, which said you cannot run a campaign that drives trial and harvests data, because trial needs no friction and data needs friction. We were half right, and the half we got wrong is the half that matters in practice, because real briefs almost never have one objective and real promotions almost always do two things whether you planned the second or not.

So the rule we actually use now is this. One job leads. A second job may ride along, on two conditions. The reward has to pay for whatever extra the ride-along asks, and the ride-along must not change what the shopper is asked to do at the shelf. Petbarn passes both: basket leads, data rides, and the card was being scanned anyway. The flights passed both: trial led, and two things rode along. The claim form that captured a customer’s details rode because a five-hundred-dollar flight pays for a form several times over, and the fame rode because a free flight with a phone plan was the kind of offer people told each other about without being asked. The Electrolux cashback passed both: basket led, and the verified purchase data from the claim rode along at no extra ask.

The test for whether a second job is riding or driving is whether the lead job’s shopper would notice it. If the stranger you wanted to try you meets a form, data is not riding along. It is driving, and trial is in the back seat wondering where it is going. That is the version of the Kill Switch that survives: not that two jobs cannot share a promotion, but that two jobs cannot share the ask. When a brief insists on both, the honest answer is not no. It is to sequence them: take the trial on the pack with nothing asked, and take the data a week later, after use, when the reward for answering can be the thing they now know they want. The free sample with a survey attached is the commonest version of this conflict we see, and the fix is the same every time. Sample now. Ask later. Pay for the asking.

What the job does to the sum

The reason the job has to be settled before the mechanic is that the job decides which term of the three-second sum gets the weight. A Breaker lives or dies on friction, because the reward for a stranger can only ever be modest and belief barely enters it; every field is a tax on the one behaviour you are paying to create. A Harvester has earned the right to ask, so friction is permitted and reward has to climb to meet it. A Loader is a reward term problem: the trade-up has a price and the reward has to clear it visibly. A Builder is belief stretched over time: the progress has to look as real on the third visit as it did on the first. A Keeper is reward of a particular shape, the kind that is worth more for being scarce. A Headliner sits outside the sum altogether, because the person it most needs to reach is not standing at the shelf: it is the person who will hear about it tomorrow.

Get the job wrong and you will tune the wrong term with great care. We have watched teams spend a fortnight on a form for a trial promotion and nobody asked why a trial promotion had a form. We have watched a loyalty offer argued down to a cash value that made it feel like a coupon, which is the one thing a loyal customer did not want to be handed. The mechanic is not the strategy. The job is the strategy, and the mechanic is how you pay for it.

The job also decides what you count afterwards, which is the part most post-mortems skip. A Breaker is judged on how many people bought for the first time. A Builder is judged on whether they came back sooner. A Loader is judged on the size of the basket. A Harvester is judged on contacts you can actually use, with permission. A Keeper is judged on who stayed. A Headliner is judged on whether people talked, wrote and went looking: coverage, conversation, search, and the tone of the retailer on the phone the following week. Sales sit underneath five of those six, and should be measured from the client’s own sell-out data wherever the client will share it. For a Headliner the honest scoreboard is fame, and judging it on entries is like judging a billboard on how many people stopped to touch it.

What the market’s numbers say

Promo-Monitor, an independent tracker of Australian promotions, sorts liquor store promotions by what they give the shopper. In 2025, 65.2 per cent were a chance to win, up from 57.2 per cent in 2022, while promotions with a certain or immediate reward fell from 39.4 to 25.4 per cent. Those are counts of promotions, not of sales, and they cannot say which job each one was doing. But a liquor draw is generally entered by buying, with a receipt or a scanned loyalty card, so the number is another way of saying that the Australian promotion is very often a Loader or a Builder wearing a prize draw. Whether it did that job sits in the brand’s sell-out data, and chapter 15 is about getting it. The job also changes what a fair comparison looks like. A Loader in appliances and a Builder in wine produce entry counts that cannot be set side by side, because the people behind them are spending very different amounts for very different reasons. Judge each promotion against its own job, and against the last promotion that did the same job in the same category.

There is a number this section would like and does not have: how far real claims land from the forecast on a cashback. Brands do not publish it, and the ones we see are not ours to print. The principle stands without it, because it is arithmetic rather than evidence: a claim estimate on a Loader is the most the promotion can cost, not what it will cost, so budget the full liability and decide in advance what happens to the gap. Chapter 4 has that decision and chapter 7 the gap.

The job that is not there

There is one more answer to the question, and it is the one nobody wants to write in a brief: there is no job. The promotion is in the calendar because there was one last year, the trade expects one, the budget line exists and the brand team would feel exposed without it. Those are reasons to run a promotion. They are not jobs, and a promotion with no job will be judged on the only thing left to judge it on, which is whether it ran smoothly.

We learned this by watching what happened when a client stopped. Footfall did not change. Takings did not change. Marketing spend dropped.

[STORY NEEDED: the pause]

The three sentences above are Mark’s, from his Trudy post, and they are the best three sentences in the chapter. The story around them is needed: who paused (named or “a client”), what was paused and for how long, what was measured, and what the client did next. Also whether the pause was our recommendation or theirs, because the chapter reads differently either way. Client stories only from public facts, or with the client’s written permission; no client data (ruling R15).

That is not an argument against promotions; it is the whole argument for naming the job. A pause tells you whether the activity was doing anything, and if the honest answer is that it was not, the next promotion gets to start from a job rather than a habit. Sometimes the job turns out to be defending the base, which is a real job with real mechanics. Sometimes it turns out to be nothing, and the kindest thing we can do with a client’s money is say so.

Where this leaves the brief: five questions for a promotion brief

So before the mechanic, before the prize, before anyone says instant win out loud, five questions, and they are the first five on every brief we write. Are strangers refusing to try you? Do buyers love you monthly when you need them weekly? Is the transaction happening but too small? Do you know nothing about who buys you? Does nobody talk about you, in a category where everyone sounds the same? One of those is the lead job. One more may ride along if the reward pays for it and the shopper never notices. If none of them is true, you are defending the base, or you are about to run a promotion for the calendar, and it is worth knowing which before the budget leaves the building.

The job is the first thing we ask in a brief, the first line on the Kill Sheet in chapter 18, and the first thing Trudy reads before it reads anything else, because everything downstream of it is cheaper to get right once it is settled. It is also the only question in this book that three people in a room must answer in the same words. If they cannot, the promotion is not ready, and no prize budget will make it so.

The next chapter is about who the shopper is when they run the sum, because the same job looks completely different depending on whether the person in the aisle is hoping or counting.