TakeAway: A promotions company is trying to use prepaid cards to push product samples, but CPG firms are hesitant to get on board.
Ken’s Take: Geez, just what consumers need … another credit or gift card in their already too fat wallets. This one will get leapfrogged pretty quickly – with a mobile app that’ll do the same thing – without another card to carry.
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Excerpt from AdAge: “A Prepaid Card Good for … One Full-Size Frozen Pizza?”
Young America, promotion-services company is joining with Citi Prepaid Services to create prepaid cards redeemable for full-size product samples at stores.
The idea is to open up sampling alternatives for product categories such as frozen foods, over-the-counter drugs and laundry detergent, where it’s either impossible or impractical to send samples through the mail or insert them into newspapers.
The prepaid cards are programmed to be redeemable only for specific SKUs and only up to the price of the item.
One advantage of using cards over using paper coupons for the same purpose is reducing the risk of redemption fraud.
Other advantages include not having to pay to ship full items to homes, not having to manufacture a special sample size and the potential for tying sampling programs to shopper-marketing programs that can induce retailers to stock and prominently display the featured products.
Young America is in talks with several marketers on the tactic but hasn’t signed any up yet.
“The con is that the brand ends up paying the retailer price vs. the manufacturer price” said a former P&G sampling-promotion executive.
Edit by ARK
The Homa Files 