Soldiering Through the First Quarter Blues It’s the day after Christmas in the States and the malls and stores are full again, this time with people returning gifts, but also people spending the gift cards they got yesterday. Gift cards, or stored value cards, are a growing Christmas gift trend in North America. Before the holiday, the National Retail Foundation projected gift card sales would balloon to $24.81 billion in 2006, a $6 billion increase over 2005’s $18.48 billion. Consumers like gift cards because they maximize their choices. Retailers love them because “ Unused Gift Cards Give Retailers $8 Billion Boon ,” to quote a recent headline from the E-Commerce Times. That is, one-third of the value on those gift cards is never redeemed and falls to the retailers' bottom line. Nice, eh? So it’s something of a curiosity that Home Depot ran this cause-related marketing ad in a flyer that came with the local newspaper on Saturday, December 24. Here’s the offer. Use a Home Depot gi...
Dedicated to highlighting and dissecting the best and the worst cause marketing promotions and campaigns.