Border's books is offering a $5 gift card to the first person to bring in a reading list from each school. To me, this sounds incredibly cheap. Am I the only one? Clearly Borders is looking to get the summer reading list so they can help guide their book purchases and in store displays. The desire to have the book lists is startegic in helping them make money. It is not part of some plan of theirs to do good. Additionally, the $5 gift cards are only being offered to the first Mom or Dad from each school to bring in the reading list. So what is Border's exposure here at the max? $100 per location? Do we really think more that 20 families from different schools will bring in reading lists? No, that won't happen.
So in an effort to gain strategic knowledge about the coming reading season Borders has only put up $100 max. In addition, they risk alienating a number of parents who are the #2, #3 and #4 families from a school to bring in the lists.
This is a classic example of using a gift card as incentive being abused. There is a fine line between a gift card offer that shows that the company or provider is using good will to 'bribe' people to participate and an offer that feels like the company is trying to abuse the gift card give away. Border's offer would have felt much better if it was closer to $20 for the first 10 families of each school. They still are offering very little but at least it would feel less like they are abusing the situation. I do realize that no one is forced to participate in these but the feeling of cheapness was transferred to me and I only read the offer.
Added on 06/29/2009
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