Good advertising, poor execution.. Part 2

Last week, my wife Lauren and I spent X-mas in my lovely home town, Mexico City. One day we were driving my mother's car, and we noticed an enormous outdoor ad in one of the streets . It belonged to Cinemex, one of the two most important movie theater companies in Mexico. Since 1992, Cinemex has opened more than 40 movie complexes around the country. The purpose of the ad was to promote Cinemex's new gift certificate. The campaign's title is "Esta Navidad regala la magia del cine" (This Christmas give someone the magic of the movies). Five minutes after looking at the ad, we heard another Cinemex spot on the radio about the same promotion. Lauren thought it would be a great idea to give movie gift cards to my brothers as a X-mas present. A couple of hours later we went to our nearest Cinemex to buy the gift certificates.

When we arrived, we realized that the theater was decorated with several promotional materials regarding the gift certificate campaign. We went to the main ticket booth and inquired about the gift cards. The clerk asked us to go to the "special guest" booth, so we went to the abandoned desk. We waited for about 6 minutes until someone finally helped us. We told the clerk we wished to buy a couple of $100 pesos gift certificates. At first, she looked confused, but then she told us to wait and she left the booth. We waited for another 10 minutes. I remember seeing her running around, asking for help to other clerks. Finally, she comes back with two gift cards and told us to wait again. She goes to the main ticket booth and spends another 5 minutes there. She comes back with the activated cards so we can pay. Before we paid I asked the clerk why it was so difficult to buy two gift cards for the theater. She first apologized and told me the whole process that involved activating the cards. I told her that it would be a good idea to make those cards easier to access, and that she should be able to activate them from her booth. Apparently, not all the clerks are trained to execute this promotion. The theater seemed empty with 10 people in the lobby, and still we waited 20 minutes to buy two gift cards. Can you imagine how long it would take if they had to deal with 10 more enthusiastic gift card buyers? It would definitely be a complete frenzy for the clerks. Although we had purchased our gifts, we left Cinemex unhappy and disappointed. Lauren and I agreed it was a shame that Cinemex spent millions of pesos in this advertising campaign to create awareness and generate traffic to the theaters, only to have customers dissatisfied with the customer service in the execution of the promotion.

In Mexico, the gift card culture has not evolved at the same pace as it has here in the U.S. Therefore, companies need to double their efforts in educating consumers about the benefits of a gift card before they can think of creative ideas to sell them. Advertising cannot do it all. Marketers need to make sure everyone in the organization to the point of sale is trained to execute a new promotion. This Cinemex case is just an example of how advertising can create awareness and drive consumers to the point of sale, but if the customer service personnel is not trained to close the sale, the whole campaign will fail. Finally, two months from now, when the marketing department finally analyzes this campaign's performance and finds that the sales were not up to par, someone will start pointing fingers. Management will likely fire the marketing manager, and the whole campaign will die without really knowing what happened. It wasn't a bad idea, just a case of bad customer service and execution.