The Pratfalls in Promotions : Marketing: With the economy in a slump, more firms are trying sales-boosting gimmicks. Some work--but there are horror stories too.

Tollye Wayne never heard a Barbara Mandrell song he didn’t like. But the country-Western radio station owner swears he won’t air one warble from her newest album, “No Nonsense.”

The music is fine. It’s the title that bugs him. No Nonsense is a brand of panty hose. Sensing a cozy fit, the makers of No Nonsense paid Mandrell $15.5 million to link up with her. Album buyers get free panty hose. But the slickest part of the promotion is that disc jockeys who mention the album title automatically plug the panty hose.

“I can’t believe Barbara Mandrell would sell out like this,” said Wayne, who ordered his Dunlap, Tenn., station not to mention the album’s name--or play music from it. “What she has done may be legal, but it is morally and ethically wrong.”

Product promotions don’t usually evoke such strong negative reactions, but many seemingly clever campaigns have received less than enthusiastic reviews from the public. That hasn’t stopped the promoters from promoting. And, with some experts predicting that the economy will remain sluggish for some time, marketers say consumers may see an explosion of sales promotions in the months ahead. Leaner times bring on promotions with a vengeance as marketers try to pry dollars from reluctant consumers.

Promotions--usually involving contests, sweepstakes or offers of freebies along with the purchase of products--have “gone crazy for one reason: They usually boost sales,” said James Pedrick, a marketing professor at USC.

But the sales increases are usually short-lived, and the promotions seldom boost overall profit. That’s because most consumers quickly jump from one promotion to the next, looking for the best deal.

Promotions proliferate in part because many are conceived not by strategists but by executives whose careers depend on short-term sales improvements, said Lesa Ukman, executive editor of the Chicago-based publication Special Events Reports. Moreover, marketers have become trapped in their own excesses. By placing so much emphasis on promotions, they have trained consumers to expect something extra before they spend their money.

But consumers are becoming more savvy about when to bite. More than a few concluded that British Airways’ recent offer of free tickets for international flights wasn’t such a good deal. Desperate to boost traffic after seeing its business shrink about a third during the Persian Gulf crisis, the carrier offered 50,000 free tickets for international flights. The company admits that about 3,500 winners rejected the freebies, many unwilling to pay the tax on two round-trip tickets valued at $1,400.

Other marketers have encountered far more serious problems with promotions in recent months. They have been dogged by practical, technical and even psychological problems that few foresaw. What many had hoped would be promotional miracles have turned out to be promotional flops.

“The problem is the safe promotions have all been tried--and tried out,” said Roberta Clarke, chairman of the marketing department at Boston University. “As promotions get more extreme, they also get more risky.”

All of this is a long way from early sales promotions. Some say that Cracker Jacks, which began putting free prizes in its boxes in 1912, was one of the pioneers in trying to nudge sales with freebies.

By 1967, Publishers Clearing House--in an attempt to increase magazine subscriptions--handed out a sweepstakes grand prize of $5,000--an amount that has ballooned to $10 million.

Every airline, hotel and car rental agency that gives away free prizes or trips has American Airlines to blame. The carrier invented the frequent-flier promotion in 1981, when it began doling out free trips to repeat customers under its “American Advantage” program. That marked the first leap into database-generated promotions. Through its current “Kids Club” promotion, Burger King has amassed a mailing list of more than 3 million kids, who regularly receive inducements to keep visiting the restaurants.

By one estimate, $120 billion will be spent on sales promotion in the United States in 1991. That’s nearly twice what the United States and its allies spent on the Persian Gulf War. The amount spent annually on sales promotion is growing at an estimated 15% clip, while ad spending is virtually flat. Many giant ad agencies that formerly belittled promotions have recently established or purchased units that specialize in creating them.

How did promotions get so popular? For one thing, clients are demanding them. That’s where advertising dollars increasingly are going.

“Advertising doesn’t do diddley. But short-term sales promotions can do great things,” said David A. Aaker, author and marketing professor at UC Berkeley. “The problem is, if you get customers involved in a promotion and then do something that turns them off, you run some risks.”

There may be no better example than this year’s Super Bowl. Before the game, General Mills made plans to put the winning team on its Wheaties cereal box. Production began well in advance of the game.

The problem: Instead of featuring Jeff Rutledge, the New York Giants’ game-winning quarterback, the photo featured the face of Phil Simms, the injured quarterback who rode the bench during the upset victory over the Buffalo Bills. “It was the best job we could do in that short time frame,” explained a General Mills spokeswoman.

Before the big game, Coke and Pepsi announced huge sales promotions that were supposed to be marvels of 20th Century technological and marketing wizardry. But by game time, technical glitches forced Pepsi to abandon its promotion. And Coke greatly downplayed its hoopla with the onset of the Persian Gulf War.

Some experts said archrivals Coke and Pepsi burned themselves because of the my-promotion-is-bigger-than-yours factor. “In many cases, companies are more concerned with the visibility of a promotion than they are with its effectiveness,” said Bud Frankel, chairman of Frankel & Co., a Chicago sales promotion firm. “The driving motivation is to be bigger than the other guy.”

Coke was the first of the soft-drink giants to announce its Super Bowl ad plans. Its “Crack the Code” promotion featured special “game pieces” sold with Coke products. During a halftime commercial, Coke planned to show viewers how to decode the pieces--by holding them up to their TV screens--to see if they had won big prizes.

Almost immediately, Pepsi announced its $20-million Super Bowl promotion. It had planned to broadcast a special toll-free number during its Super Bowl commercials to encourage people to phone during the game. From among the millions of expected callers, three were to be selected as $1-million prize winners.

By Super Bowl day, Pepsi and Coke had egg on their promotional faces.

At the eleventh hour, Pepsi shelved its promotion when Federal Communications Commission officials expressed concern that the expected 5 million phone calls might disrupt the nation’s communications systems.

With the Persian Gulf War under way, Coke replaced its light-hearted promotion with a stark ad that said the timing wasn’t right for frivolity.

Both soft drink makers strongly deny that their Super Bowl promotions were flops.

At the time of the Super Bowl, Coke was still feeling the sting from last summer’s much-ballyhooed--but short-lived--”Magican” promotion. The premise was simple enough. When consumers opened certain cans of Coke, a technical gadget allowed prizes like $5 bills to pop up in their faces.

Sounds pretty neat, right? Except that some of the cans malfunctioned, and the money didn’t come out. Several supermarkets reported vandals wantonly popping open their entire stock of Coke cans in search of the prizes.

What’s more, the cans with prizes weren’t filled with Coke but with a non-potable water that wasn’t supposed to come out. Of course, there were reports of children who found ways to get to--and drink--the water. And there was some havoc on a United Airlines flight when a flight attendant who couldn’t pour the liquid out of a Coke Magican suspected it had a bomb in it.

Coke ran full-page advertisements in national newspapers explaining the problems with its Magicans. But it was too late, and the promotion was junked.

“Any time you innovate with a unique promotional offer, you run risks,” said Coke spokesman Bob Bertini.

But the ultimate goal of all promotions is to increase sales. Regardless of the bad publicity, Bertini said, “Magicans helped to do that.”

At least Coke’s customers didn’t take it to court. Beatrice Co. was forced on the defensive in a dispute over a Monday Night Football promotion it sponsored five years ago. In the scratch-off contest, players won if they revealed numbers that corresponded to the number of touchdowns and field goals scored in the first eight Monday night games.

Two men figured out how to get hundreds of tickets that would produce numerous winning combinations worth millions of dollars. They sued when the firm refused to pay. Although Beatrice contended that the men violated the rules in obtaining some tickets, it eventually settled out of court.

“It was not the most pleasant experience to go through,” said Kay Carpenter, spokeswoman at Beatrice’s Hunt Wesson Inc. division, which sponsored the contest.

Kraft drew the wrath of consumers when it printed so many winning tickets to one promotion that it had to cancel the whole thing. No one at Kraft General Foods bothered to double-check the number of winning game pieces that were printed for a regional contest that promoted its cheese. Essentially, every game piece turned out to be a winner.

Kraft expected to give away a minivan or two. But hundreds of people in the Chicago area ended up with winning game pieces. As a result, Kraft called off the contest.

It offered to give $250 cash prizes to those who had been told that they had won minivans and smaller cash gifts to those who had been told that they had won other prizes. Those who were supposed to have won minivans sued the company in litigation that is still pending. Kraft declined to comment on the suit.

The worst nightmare is a promotion that becomes a potential health hazard. Such was the case with a plastic sports bottle promotion that Taco Bell held last summer. The bottles, sold at Taco Bells for 99 cdnts, were found to have tops that could be easily swallowed by young children. The company quickly recalled the 300,000 bottles that had been sold and halted plans to sell another 2 million.

“Nobody thought it would happen,” said Elliott Bloom, a Taco Bell spokesman. “But we have nothing to be embarrassed about. We immediately recalled the bottles. We did the right thing.”

It may be too early to call Barbara Mandrell’s “No Nonsense” promotion a flop. Sales of her album don’t seem to have suffered, said her father and manager, Irby Mandrell. “Frankly, I think we were pretty smart to make the deal,” he boasted.

Maybe so. But one nonprofit consumers group called the promotion the “sellout of the year.” Surely the promotion didn’t come off as smoothly as the makers of No Nonsense, Wickes’ Kayser-Roth Hosiery unit, had hoped.

The nagging question remains: Why are so many marketing giants making promotional blunders?

“There is a ridiculous notion in marketing that you have to try something new to generate business,” adds Jay Levinson, a Mill Valley, Calif., marketing consultant. “But when companies try to break new ground, they often have little information to base their decisions on.”

“When you reach too hard and get away from the core image of the brand, you leave yourself open for things to go wrong,” said Jeffrey Hirsch, a Venice marketing consultant. “Companies are relying on gimmickry and technology to deliver messages that have nothing to do with the essence of their products.”

This is not to say that all sales promotions are failures. Some are wildly successful.

“Promotions always get the rap as a lower life form than advertising,” said Matt Alcone, whose Irvine firm Alcone Promotions devised what is generally regarded as the most successful sales promotion of 1990, the Burger King “Kids Club.” “I say there’s a lot more accountability in sales promotion than in advertising.”

Through the mail, Burger King keeps in bimonthly contact with Kids Club members, constantly giving them new reasons to visit. Officials know that children aren’t much interested in saving a few nickels on hamburgers, but they can be lured with promises of free or inexpensive gifts, such as Bart Simpson dolls or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle videotapes.

Every time a kid gets a personalized letter from Burger King, “the impression is one thousand times more than that of a TV commercial,” said Stan Rapp, a marketing consultant. “The new world of promotion is database-driven. It’s the most important marketing tool since TV.”

Times librarian Janet Lundblad contributed to the research in this story.

BURGER KING ‘KIDS CLUB’ PROMOTION * Introduced in January, 1990.

* Signed up 1.6 million members in first six months. Membership now exceeds 2.7 million.

* Kids Club Meals are served in specially-designed bags made with recycled newspapers and often include toy gifts or special premiums inside.

* Kids Club members receive personalized membership cards that guarantee them free meals on their birthdays.

* Kids Club members are also mailed “Funstuff” magazine, a booklet that features games, contests, coupons and special promotions to lure kids back to Burger King.

* Special “Burger-N-Books” bookmarks are mailed to Kids Club members. Kids are asked to read four books and write the names of the books on the bookmarks. Free meals are given to to those kids who redeem the completed bookmark lists.

PROMOTIONAL BLUNDERS

Company Promotion The problem Coca-Cola “Magicans” Money didn’t always pop out of cans. Pepsi Super Bowl phone-in Canceled due to technological glitches. No Nonsense Album/panty hose tie-in Resentment of Barbara Mandrell’s “sellout.” Taco Bell Plastic sports bottles Safety problems with removable caps. Kraft Ready to Roll contest Printed too many winning tickets.