howard | 
07 3rd, 2010| 
If you’re an iPhone 4 wannabee – like a lot of us right now, signal failures or not – and a twitter fan then you probably can’t have helped to notice the sales promotion that was offered recently by a bulk-purchase discount website called Groupola.
Now, I’d not heard of Groupola before these last few days, but I sure have now, and that was obviously the point of their sales promotion – to raise awareness of the brand and to attract huge numbers of subscribers to their email list.
To that end there wasn’t anything wrong with what they were trying to do, and they won’t be the last brand to offer a heavily discounted offer in return for your valuable contact details – something a lot of people forget when they ask questions naively like “how can they offer these phones so cheap? It’s got to be a scam” – because of course it’s not – they’ve (hopefully!) worked out the average value of you as an individual to the business and bobs your uncle, 80% off an iPhone.
That’s all fine, I get it, no worries.
But why then has there been such an outrage on the web around this piece of SP? Is it because it was a scam and the 200+ iPhones they’ve apparently “sold” were never sold? I don’t think so and to be honest I have no reason to believe one way or the other but there are lots of people who don’t believe (me not being one of them!) but I think most of that is anger at not getting one and they’re bitter because they’re tight and don’t want to fork out £499 for a legit one from Apple.
Not getting your hands on one wouldn’t have been a problem if the site you were directed to via the “secret” link (which they then asked you to retweet in the same email so, not that secret then!) hadn’t spectacularly crashed out and simply stopped responding because of the huge volumes in traffic directed to the site.
And that’s the fail. This brand grabbed a basic idea – give something amazingly popular away for next to nothing to raise awareness of your brand and your business model (this is after all what they do – bulk discounts) – but they failed to consider the technical implications of a major web traffic spike to their infrastructure.
You simply cannot do that with digital marketing because as we all know, or at least should know, technology, serving and all of that generally boring (sorry networks guys!) ugly stuff behind the scenes is just as important as the good looking sexy stuff in front of the web browser. Forget that simple fact and you are doomed to failure.
Imagine if the BBC site crashed during the World Cup or Wimbledon coverage recently – like it did during 9/11 all those years ago when the web was still in infancy – or if something like the telephone system behind American Idol couldn’t cope with the calls during the show. All stuff like this could be a disaster, and that’s exactly where Groupola now find themselves.
If they’d thought it through, up-scaled their server capacity, and put in place the correct pages to say “sorry guys, we’ve sold out, but here are the lucky real people winners” no one would have minded. But they didn’t. And the servers crashed. And the rest is twitter history.
A lesson learnt for sure. And possibly a world record set in how to quickly grow a mailing list and then lose it all to a huge unsusbcribe request 24 hours later.
Howard
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