Woolworths has apologised to thousands of customers after mistakenly telling about 79,000 people they had won a competition.
Woolworths has apologised to thousands of customers after mistakenly telling about 79,000 people they had won a competition.
The email for the Big Night In prize was meant to be sent to about 1000 winning customers.
Instead, 79,000 extra so-called winners were sent the same email - awarding them 4000 points towards the supermarket's Everyday Rewards card system, which would equal $30 worth of groceries.
I was thinking about this. And under the rule of "if doesn't matter what they are saying about you as long as they're talking about you", perhaps the marketing power is higher to deny it and make front page? It wouldn't have been as big of a big news story if they had just paid it.
The only people that think otherwise are marketers who get paid their consulting fees regardless and millionaire executives that have no idea what the average person thinks because they've never been one and believe those consultants at face value.
Not sure about a legal requirement for a clear human error type mistake.
That being said... The prize was the point equivalent of $30 of groceries. They should just acknowledge the issue, and say that they're letting people keep the points anyway. Just shift it to being an unexpected $2.3M advertising campaign. I'm sure they'd get more publicity out of that than actually spending the money on traditional advertising nowadays.
I don't think this Woolworths is related to the American Woolworth's. They seem to have different histories. This is an Australian company that is one of the duopoly of supermarkets in NZ.
Originally it was literally a spoof of the US Woolworth's called Walworth's, then they realised under Aus law they could just use the original name
That's why In-N-Out does pop-ups in Aus for one day every few years, to protect their trademark. And also relates to why Hungry Jack's is just a Burger King franchise