Beat the incoming HFFS ban with Prize promotions.

With delays brought on by Covid and the ensuing financial downturn, the Labour government has decided to finally bring proposed advertising bans on unhealthy products in to play this October (2025).

This is going to create a huge vacuum for brands who have become reliant on price discounting to drive ROS. But fear not, on or off pack Prize promotions can fill in the gaps.

When done well, they not only have a short-term sales effect but can have long-term benefits too, including:

– Showcasing a brand’s proposition

– Providing a way to stand out from competition

– Aiding the negotiation of incremental in-store display at retail

– Encouraging trial

– Driving sales

– Rewarding loyalty

– Collecting much needed first party data post the updated privacy restrictions on third-party cookies

Indeed, research has shown that 33% of prize promotion participants are open to receiving information about a brand.  And contests have an extremely high conversion rate, 34%, which is significant when compared to other sources such as PPC. And it doesn’t need to be expensive to run them either.

We recently conducted a study that surveyed respondents who had been persuaded to buy products based on promotions where they can win or get something. The aim of the research was to reveal the psychological tipping points of prize promotions and we uncovered some surprising insights.

Here are just two:

– Consumers react as favourably to smaller value prizes as they do to larger cash-value prizes

– Consumers react as favourably to low numbers of prizes being offered as they do vast numbers of prizes


However, brands do need think about being good citizens.

Make your promotion believable.

Shoppers are smart and will question the validity of a small brand offering to give away a million pounds. For consumers to trust in what’s up for grabs, brands should look at publicly announcing the winners at the end of a campaign to ensure people know it’s legit.

Trust and transparency are key.

It may seem obvious, but so many brands fail to be transparent about the terms and conditions of entering a competition, or sometimes even fail to effectively communicate the entry method. This inevitably leads to confused customers, complaints on social media and, albeit rare, legal battles.

Ensure optimal security.

Obviously printing unique reference numbers onto packaging is expensive so it isn’t the first choice approach – yet by avoiding doing this, it’s much easier for bots (and persistent humans!) to play the system. But there are now ways do work around this and they cost little to implement.
Ensure your shopper marketing spend matches the promotion.

Another slip-up brands can often make is not supporting the promotion with a big enough media budget, which is necessary if you are a brand with limited facings and a less than preferable position on shelf. A good rule of thumb is to check if the supporting media budget outweighs the cost of the promotion by at least 3 to 1. If it does, then ROI will be maximised.

If you are considering running a prize promotion, or if this article has subsequently persuaded you to look in to doing so, please do get in touch.  Our shopper team have run 100s of them in the past and would be delighted to chat you through their point of view and findings in a 30-minute chat.

Please email james.willoughby@senselondon.com to find out more.

London

5th Floor Century House
100 Oxford Street
London
W1D 1LN

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Discover our latest guides to help brighten your brand experience strategy or amplify your shopper marketing moves. Get them here at The Futures Lab.

London

5th Floor Century House
100 Oxford Street
London
W1D 1LN

New York

243 E 14th
#2 C/O SQ
New York
NY 10003

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Discover our latest guides to help brighten your brand experience strategy here at The Future Lab

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Experiential

Whether it be Festivals, Trade Shows, PR Stunts, Installations or Pop Ups to name a few, we believe brand experiences are one of the most powerful forms of marketing to impact consumer perception and attitude towards a brand. They can create real behaviour change when born out of a deep consumer insight allied to a compelling idea. And it’s these fundamentals we look to get right whatever the live, virtual or hybrid task in hand.

Sampling.

Sampling is all too often perceived as an unsophisticated, somewhat ‘blunt’ marketing tool. Over the last 16 years Sense has pioneered a set of strategic principles which underpin our unique approach to sampling and which are highly measurable from both an ROI and consumer behaviour change perspective. We will happily guide brands through the myriad of sampling channels and products available so whether it’s mass face to face sampling, in offices, digitally, at home or just a strategic framework that you are after, we can provide a blend of tactics to fulfil both brand and sales objectives.

Retail.

With many clients now focused on activating in channels more closely associated with a sale, our heavyweight retail experience closes the loop on a typical shopper journey by encompassing the moment of truth in store. Be it prize promotions, shopper toolkits, key visual creation, path-to-purchase communications, category strategy, B2B campaigns or Amazon optimisation, our goal is to create forward-thinking retail experiences that deliver demonstrable brand value. We aim to make ‘retail fail’ a thing of the past for ambitious brands looking to thrive is an ever-competitive landscape and believe our streamlined team is perfectly placed to do this.

Foresight.

Knowing what will keep a brand bright, exciting, and vital means we need to keep one step ahead of the curve. Our thought leadership hub, The Futures Lab, helps us to understand the marketing trends of tomorrow. It’s also the origin of strategies and methodologies which have created over 65 award-winning campaigns. 

Rigour.

Creativity is nothing without results. And we know that commissioning bold concepts, capable of changing minds, requires reassurance that it’s the right thing to do. 

Data, insights, and research precedes every campaign we do, and our proprietary measurement tool, EMR, gives us a decade of campaign performance metrics. Which is why we’re proud to have been recognised as industry-leading by brands like The Economist, Coca-Cola, and Molson Coors. 

Trust.

We believe brand experience is inherently more varied than other forms of marketing. No formula, no template, no cookie-cutter approach – and often no precedent. 

That’s why, Sense places trust at the heart of its business – grounded in teamwork between our people and yours. Our processes are efficient, our senior team stay involved and our partnership mentality had helped us sustain powerful client relationships, some lasting over 10 years.