Hoover Flights Fiasco
Hoover’s flight fiasco
Hoover’s famous for household cleaning equipment such as vacuum cleaners, floor cleaners, washing machines and so on. They dominated the home cleaning market for years, but in the early 90’s people started buying from other new and modern brands, such as Dyson and Electrolux. In order not to lose clients in favor of their competitors, the company had to figure out a way in order to retain their customers. Famous for their promotional campaigns, Hoover came up with an idea in order to promote their products. It was year 1992 that will be remembered as the “Hoover free flights fiasco. “Buy any Hoover product worth 100 pounds and get 2 airline tickets FREE” was their marketing campaign which, somehow, seems quite unbelievable, right? Unfortunately, this turned out to be a major issue and a huge mistake that cost the company around 50 million pounds. Now, let’s see how things happened: at a price of minimum 100 pounds, people were able to purchase 2 free return flights to Europe (initially) and a household product-offer way to generous as it turned out to be. As a normal reaction, the demands started to overflow the capacity of the company, and while the travel agencies struggled to cope with the overwhelming response, Hoover decided again to launch a second promotion, but this time for America. At that point, the claims for vouchers simply boosted, leaving the company with an incapability to deliver its promises. The consequences were imminent, the company finding itself overwhelmed with the requests and the so the customers were given a reminder to send their applications, moment when things gone from bad to worse. Soon, complaints started to be filed against Hoover which was unable to deliver to all the 600,000 people expecting their vouchers, out of which 220.000 vouchers made it to USA, leaving the company with 380.000 disappointed people. The result was hundreds of customers taking the company to court up until 1998 and this mistake cost
Hoover’s famous for household cleaning equipment such as vacuum cleaners, floor cleaners, washing machines and so on. They dominated the home cleaning market for years, but in the early 90’s people started buying from other new and modern brands, such as Dyson and Electrolux. In order not to lose clients in favor of their competitors, the company had to figure out a way in order to retain their customers. Famous for their promotional campaigns, Hoover came up with an idea in order to promote their products. It was year 1992 that will be remembered as the “Hoover free flights fiasco. “Buy any Hoover product worth 100 pounds and get 2 airline tickets FREE” was their marketing campaign which, somehow, seems quite unbelievable, right? Unfortunately, this turned out to be a major issue and a huge mistake that cost the company around 50 million pounds. Now, let’s see how things happened: at a price of minimum 100 pounds, people were able to purchase 2 free return flights to Europe (initially) and a household product-offer way to generous as it turned out to be. As a normal reaction, the demands started to overflow the capacity of the company, and while the travel agencies struggled to cope with the overwhelming response, Hoover decided again to launch a second promotion, but this time for America. At that point, the claims for vouchers simply boosted, leaving the company with an incapability to deliver its promises. The consequences were imminent, the company finding itself overwhelmed with the requests and the so the customers were given a reminder to send their applications, moment when things gone from bad to worse. Soon, complaints started to be filed against Hoover which was unable to deliver to all the 600,000 people expecting their vouchers, out of which 220.000 vouchers made it to USA, leaving the company with 380.000 disappointed people. The result was hundreds of customers taking the company to court up until 1998 and this mistake cost