When brands go bad

Recently MTN held a competition for customers to celebrate their 15th birthday. It seems like a perfect opportunity for a brand to profile itself and reward loyal customers, especially in light of the ridiculously high rates South African consumers are expected to pay for mobile services in relation to the rest of the world.

MTN arguably botched this one up. Customers stood the chance to win a homeloan to the value of R1 million, 14 Toyota Fortuners and plenty other prizes that MTN would give away daily.

In order to win, participants had to answer general knowledge questions. The more questions that were answered correctly, the more points were accumulated, and the more points were promised for answering the next question correctly. Each SMS cost R7.50.

Firstly, to expect a loyal and regularly paying MTN customer to fork out R7,50 for a competition SMS and then encourage them to continue accumulating points through subsequent SMS’s, is not in the spirit of a celebration and certainly no reward for a majority of South Africa’s cell phone users. One could be forgiven for thinking that this entry mechanism had the sole of objective of funding the competition in the first place.

Secondly, according to an IOL news article, The Star newspaper had established that winners seemed to know each other, were friends on Facebook, colleagues or spouses. Rumours surfaced that there was a website where entrants could check their accumulated points and knew exactly how many SMS’s they needed to send in to accumulate enough points to win.

MTN launched an inquiry into this matter and to top this off, independent complaints about the competition resulted in the National Lottery Board investigating and finding the competition illegal.

The competition was closed a month ahead of schedule on the 5th July. This is what MTN had to say: “Whereas this competition generated a lot of excitement and participation, it unfortunately reached a stage where the debate surrounding it was not consistent with the MTN Values and detracted from the intended spirit of the game for our customers.”

Interesting. It is reassuring to know that illegality is not a value of MTN’s, although I still find it immensely disturbing that such a massive brand considers R7,50 for competition SMSs consistent with their values and proceeded with a mechanism for a competition that was so obviously not customer-centric.

I am dying to know exactly what their values are.

MTN, you have disappointed me immensely. This makes it tempting to change to another brand. Realistically, I won’t because of the admin and time associated with a sim swap and change in service provider, and because I do not believe any one network in this country will truly liberate me from paying about 5 times the price of my Indian counterparts (who similarly live in a developing nation).

Sources: IOL News, Bizcommunity.com and News24.com