Three Stars for Ster Kinekor

The big boys get it wrong. Often. Ster Kinekor has been in the limelight on a couple of occasions in the past that I feel slightly bad for highlighting their flaws again.
However, for the sake of marketing, I hope this is seen in the relevant light.
But I want to start with the good stuff. They have done a sterling job on their web presence, because they realise the importance of it. Their website is posh, there’s no two ways about it. They only carry two banner advertisements and on top of that, it’s relevant. Heads up!
The site loads very quickly, despite all the animations and movie clips. There’s minimal navigation required, a feast to eye and the fingers of browsers landing there.
All in all, a job done fantastically well. It’s getting there that’s proving to be a chink in the armour. Once you get the hang of the internet and its browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc), you start becoming familiar with shortcuts.
One of these shortcuts is not having to type www before a web address. These days, I never do. And finding Ster Kinekor’s website that way proved fruitless. Typing http://sterkinekor.co.za simply takes me to an error page and forced me to revert to Google to find the correct address.
Arbitrary, you may think. And you’d possibly be right. But, you may find that patience is one of the single greatest issues with marketing today. Simply put, we don’t have any.
Which leads me to my next gripe. I was watching Will Ferrell’s Blades of Glory on Sunday night. To this day I’m not sure why, but that’s a debate for another day. I can’t stand the man.
Anyways, some of you might have noticed that after the movie, Ster Kinekor ran a competition giving away the movie on DVD, which I of course, have no interest in. But I suspect that some of my intellectually challenged friends might just.
They ask a ridiculously easy question and then require you to fax your name and contact details to a number that is so long, it can only compare to our South African 911 equivalent…whatever it is.
See anything wrong with that picture? I do. They want you, yes you, to get off your lazy post-Sunday-night-dinner ass, grab a piece of paper, write down your name and contact details and fax it to a number that is as cryptic as the Da Vinci Code. Fax! FAX!
If you don’t want people to participate in a competition, don’t run it. If you do however, have them text the answer to a shorter number (called a short code) in my humble opinion.
More entries and shockingly, you’ll now have a database of mobile numbers to market your products to in future.
Nice.

http://bluespotmedia.ning.com/