| Idea #1 - Customers clean out their storage drawers during Film Amnesty promotions
Tim Jones - Perfect Prints Camera Centre - Tasmania, Australia - www.perfectprints.com.au
Editor's note: Tim Jones discussed this idea with Bill McCurry as he was formulating it, so we're sharing some of his developmental thought processes as well as the results
Subject:
Bill, can I run this promo by you.
Greetings from Tasmania!
I am about to run a new promotion and would like your feedback if you have time.
I haven't finished the POS yet but attach the work in progress. The first document will be a poster in the window with a few bags of film and the second is really the options and fine print.
I reckon every household has a few unprocessed films and I know of somebody who has 200 !
I am going to try to promote it from a public service point of view and will initially send out a press release. I will follow that up with a sort of advertorial in the local paper.
What do you think?
Regards .... Tim
Bill, just to keep you in the loop, the film amnesty is going at full speed!
After taking on board your feedback I simplified it with the quantities and so on. Have done about 200 rolls so far and getting 10 to 50 a day. About 50% are for develop plus 6x9 index, 30% develop plus CD, 10% develop only and the rest are D&P. We have also done quite a few reprints after people have looked at their index prints.
Had a fair few calls with people who thought that "develop only" means "develop and print" but that was always going to be a problem.
I placed one ad in the local paper in an advertorial section and since then word of mouth has been the chosen method.
People have always felt guilty about having these rolls at home and once they get them processed they can't wait to tell everybody!
Next week I expect to be on local radio and that should really work well. 
I have a few other labs looking at doing the promo. Alan Logue in Adelaide, David Owen in Warrnambool, Roy Tait in the north of my state and of course Phil in Brisbane. Phil seems particularly excited in the way that only Phil can be, I think dangerously excited would be the word. I deliberately haven't told him about the radio idea yet. I will tell him next week about that part of the promo.
He and I discussed margin. There is a cost in film chemistry but as we weren't putting enough rollage through, the cost is negligible.
That it is certainly helping to keep the machine in control. The cost of a large index is about 25 cents and a CD about 30 cents. So no significant costs.
It's possible to do about 30 to 40 an hour so labour costs are not a problem and in any case the rolls are done when there is nothing else to do.
So, thanks for your feedback which was useful in making the promotion simpler.
The poster with the terms of promotion
I do need to update my website and then will include that on all my POS. I will try and do that over the weekend, it is woefully out of date and not at all retail oriented.
Regards ... Tim
Incidentally the amnesty idea came from one of your comments that no longer could we rely on any part of the business to supply more than 20% of the profit. V My aim is to find ten areas each to supply 20% of the profit. That adds up to 200% and that is the whole idea!
Regards ... Tim |
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