Part III, The Craft · Chapter 18

The Toolbox

A promotion checklist, a pre-mortem, build or buy, and launch readiness

The free meal that was too popular

In April 2009 KFC put grilled chicken on its menus across the United States. For a chain whose name begins with the word fried, it was a big bet, and it had the job every new product has: get people to try it. On 5 May, Oprah Winfrey told the audience of her show that they could download a coupon from her website for a free meal: two pieces of the new grilled chicken, two sides and a biscuit. No purchase. The coupon was available to download for a day, and KFC extended that by another.

Run the three-second sum from chapter 1 on that offer and it is close to perfect. The reward was a whole meal. Belief came from Oprah Winfrey, in person, on her own show. The friction was a printer. Millions of people downloaded the coupon, and within days the lines, in the words of KFC’s US president, Roger Eaton, “have been out the door and around the block.” Some stores ran out of chicken.

On 7 May KFC said it could no longer accept the coupon. Eaton recorded an apology and posted it online: “We would like to apologize to our customers who have been inconvenienced by the overwhelming response.” Coupon holders could fill in a form in store and be mailed a rain check, with a free soft drink added, to be used over two weeks. A class action followed in June, in Los Angeles, calling the promotion “a classic example of a bait and switch.” By the time the giveaway was suspended, KFC had served about 4.5 million free meals.

Eaton’s view, a few weeks later, was that it had been worth it. “The critical thing for us was to get people to eat the chicken, whatever it took,” he said, and the results “outweighed all the challenges we’ve had by a mile.” KFC did not release sales figures, so we cannot score it, and chapter 15 is clear that we should not try. But look at what did and did not go wrong. Nobody in that story had a bad idea. A free meal to launch a new product is a textbook Breaker. What failed was the build around it: an offer with no limit on how many coupons could exist, stores that had not been sized for what the coupons would bring, and no plan for what to tell people if it had to stop. The rain check was invented in two days, in public.

This chapter is the tools we use so that the idea survives and the build gets fixed before launch rather than after. There are four of them: the Kill Sheet, the one-page brief, the pre-mortem and the launch checklist. None of them is clever. All of them are cheaper than an apology video.

A promotion checklist that says how, not no

The first edition of this book had a tool called the Kill Sheet: ten questions, a point for each honest yes, and a rule that anything under eight did not launch. It did its job, which was to stop bad promotions reaching a category manager. It also did a job we did not intend. A score out of ten is a verdict, and a verdict ends the conversation. Teams learned to argue about whether a row deserved its point, when the useful question was what it would take to earn it.

So the Kill Sheet keeps its name and changes what it produces. It kills builds, never ideas. Every row is a question about the promotion as it is currently built. A yes moves on. A no is not allowed to stand on its own: it has to come back with a named move from somewhere in this book, an owner and a cost. The sheet is finished when every no has one. If a move costs more than the idea is worth, that is a decision for the client, made with the price in front of them, and sometimes the honest answer is that this version does not exist at any price. That is still a better meeting than the one where somebody says it will never work and nobody asks why.

Here it is, in the order we run it. Each row points back to the chapter where the move lives.

The Kill Sheet

Run on KFC’s coupon, the sheet passes the first six rows almost without stopping. It stops at seven. The worst case was every person who downloaded a coupon walking into a store in the same week, and nobody could say what that cost or whether the stores could cook it. The moves are on the sheet: cap the number of coupons, or the number per store per day; release them by region instead of all at once; write the rain check before launch, not after. Not one of those moves touches the idea. Each of them makes a free meal a promise KFC could keep.

How to write a promotion brief on one page

The Kill Sheet reads a brief, so the brief has to hold what the sheet asks. We keep ours to a page, because a brief that needs three pages has usually not decided something, and the length is where the undecided thing hides.

The One-Page Brief

The lead job, in one sentence, and the second job if one rides along. Who is in the aisle: the shopper, the consumer and the payer, and which pilot is flying. Where it will be met, and who has to say yes for it to be met there. The sales number that would mean it worked, the measure and the baseline. The budget, split three ways: reward, reach and venue. The dates, including the date of the review. What the promotion must never do: the brand lines, the rules, the things the retailer will not accept. And one line on what happens if we do nothing.

The last line is the one most often left blank. Chapter 15 explained why it is the most expensive blank on the page.

Run a pre-mortem before the promotion launches

In 2007 the psychologist Gary Klein described a meeting he called the premortem in the Harvard Business Review. Before a project starts, the team imagines it is some time later and the project has failed, completely. Each person writes down why. Then the reasons are read out and the plan is changed to answer them. The idea rests on a 1989 study by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington, which found that people asked to imagine an outcome had already happened came up with more reasons for it than people asked whether it might happen. The study counted reasons; it did not test whether they were the right ones. That is enough for our purposes. In a pre-mortem you are not trying to predict the failure. You are trying to hear the reason nobody would otherwise say out loud.

For a promotion we run it the day before the Kill Sheet’s final pass, with one change. A promotion can fail in three directions, and it is worth asking about each one separately.

Too few. Nobody came. The reward was under the threshold, the odds felt like nothing, the pack was in the back room, or the retailer never put it on the floor. This is the failure everyone imagines, and it lives on the shopper’s three faders and on Venue.

Too many. Everybody came, at once. The stores ran out, the website fell over, the claims queue ran into months, the prize budget went with it. This is KFC’s failure and Hoover’s in chapter 4, and it lives on Liability and on the engine.

The wrong ones. The people who came were not the people you wanted: entry farms, bots, resellers, the shopper who was going to buy anyway and has now been paid to. This one lives on Friction and on the scoreboard, and it is the hardest to see, because the dashboard looks like success.

Twenty minutes is usually enough. If the room cannot think of a way the promotion fails in one of the three directions, ask someone who was not in the room.

Promotion platform: build it or buy it?

We should declare an interest before this section. We run a claims and redemption platform, so we have a view, and you should read what follows as the questions we would ask in your seat rather than a recommendation.

Promotions are hard on systems in a particular way. They are spiky by design: quiet for months, then everyone at once, usually on the first weekend and the last. They are regulated: draws, permits, records kept for years in some states, cash paid a certain way in others (chapter 16). They involve money moving to strangers, which brings fraud with it. And they are short, so the cost of building something has to be paid back by one campaign, or a few. Those four things decide most build-or-buy questions.

How often does it run? An always-on program, a loyalty scheme or a standing cashback, can justify its own system. A promotion that runs twice a year usually cannot.

Can it take the spike? Systems built for steady traffic fail on the first Saturday. Ask what it has handled before, at what peak, and what happened.

Who carries the errors? A receipt approved that should not have been, or rejected when it should not have been, costs money or trust. Know whose money and whose trust before launch.

What has to be yours? Whatever the engine, the customer relationship and the data you were given consent to keep belong to the brand (chapter 11). Rent the machinery if it makes sense; never rent the relationship.

Our old rule of thumb still holds up: if it takes more than two weeks to build for one promotion, do not build it for one promotion. Build what you will run every week. Buy, or borrow, what you will run twice a year.

Promotion launch checklist

The Kill Sheet asks whether the promotion is right. The launch checklist asks whether it is ready. They are different questions, and plenty of right promotions have launched before they were ready. These are the checks we do in the last week, most of them with our hands rather than in a meeting.

The Launch Checklist

Scan the printed code on a real pack, from the shelf, not the file. Enter on a cheap phone on mobile data, start to finish, and time it. Read the terms against every ad, every pack and every screen, and fix the ad if they differ. Check that the permit numbers are granted and printed. Check the privacy notice is live where the data is collected and that marketing consent is asked separately. Confirm the stock is in the distribution centre and the display is booked in store. Brief the people who will be asked about it: store staff, the service desk, the retailer’s own team. Test the engine at a peak well above the one you expect. Confirm the prizes are bought, insured or banked, and that the payment dates can be met. Record the baseline and the comparison before the first sale. Put the review in the diary. And write the pause plan.

When to pause a promotion, and how

Almost no promotion plan we have seen says what happens if the promotion has to stop. It is the page nobody wants to write, because writing it admits the possibility. KFC shows the cost of not writing it. The rain check that ended up being offered was a reasonable answer; it was just designed in two days, with lines outside, by people who had other things to do that week.

A pause plan is short. Who can stop the promotion, and how quickly. What the shopper who arrives after it stops is told, in words written in advance. What they are given instead, whether a rain check, a substitute or a later date, and whether that substitute is allowed under the terms and the permits. Who tells the retailer, the regulator if a permit condition is affected, and the client’s own service desk. And how the terms allow for it: chapter 16 explained why a clause giving the promoter absolute discretion to change anything is risky, and the better answer is a specific clause for a specific event, agreed before launch.

Where this leaves the book

This book began in an aisle, with a trolley passing a wobbler and a stranger deciding in three seconds whether we were worth the bother. Everything since has been about what happens before those three seconds: the job the promotion is for, the person running the sum, the friction that pays for the generosity, the engine behind the creative, the five faders and the moves for when they run out, the six jobs, the retailer who has to say yes, the scoreboard, the rules and the machine that now sits in the room.

The tools in this chapter are the same book in a form you can take into a meeting. They are only useful in one place: the room where the promotion is still a page and a few people who disagree about it. By the time it is in the store, the Kill Sheet has nothing left to kill. In that room, the most useful sentence anyone can say is not that something will not work. It is which part will not work, and what it would take.

We called the craft the dark art in chapter 1, and said this book was the art written down with the lights on. It turns out to be mostly that sentence, asked over and over, by people who have seen enough promotions go wrong to know where to look. Almost every good idea has a version that works. The craft is finding it, and the tools are how you find it before the shopper does.