This is Broken! … IKEA edition
A couple of years ago the bestselling Marketing author Seth Godin gave a couple of presentations that he called ‘This is Broken’. In these presentations he would give example after example of products, customer service, and other marketing efforts that were so bad that they infuriated him, and presumably lots of other customers.
Here is my version, from my recent experience at IKEA in Geneva, Switzerland.
I actually quite like IKEA; we have IKEA products all over the house. They’re of decent and consistent quality, and I don’t mind putting them together myself because that saves me a lot of money.
I try to avoid shopping there because I don’t like the crowds, and the way they force you to walk through the entire store to buy a small bookshelf. But nowadays you can buy things online and pick it up at a loading area, so you don’t even need to go inside.
On this occasion we bought a couple of large drawer cabinets for the bedroom, and everything went smoothly. We ordered, got a notification the next day, and I drove there to pick it up.
I was pleasantly surprised to get some vouchers for food and drink at their cafeteria. Ten vouchers of 5 Swiss Francs (about 5 US Dollars) each; 50 Francs on a purchase of just over 500; about 10%. It was too early for lunch, but I decided to get a drink, and maybe a cake, straight away.
Not so fast. A bottle of water and cake added up to about 7 Francs, so I tried to pay with two vouchers. The cashier told me kindly I could only use one voucher at a time … and only on a purchase of at least 25 Francs. I ended up walking away without my water and cake, genuinely pissed off.
25 Francs minimum is ridiculous. The few times I’ve eaten at IKEA I paid about 15 Francs for my meal. So I would have to order more than I’d normally take, or perhaps come with a friend, to spend enough to get my 5 Francs discount. Spend 10 Francs extra to get a 5 Francs discount.
I threw the vouchers in the first bin I saw.
This is Broken! They gave me 50 Francs in vouchers that were impossible to use; I would have to eat at IKEA 10 times before the 3-month expiry date, each time ordering more than I normally eat, and spending a total of 250 Francs, to get the full 50 Francs value.
They could have just given me a 5-Francs beverage voucher instead, I would have been happy with that. Instead they gave me 50 Francs that they knew I would never redeem.
Maybe this promotion was created by accountants, not marketers.
