Terms and Conditions

Its been a while since my last posting. My apologies for the absence.

Of late, I've been receiving quite a few value meal vouchers. In my last entry on delivering value, I advocated the importance of delivering value into your business. But recently, I've come across a restaurant which I felt did not quite delivery value or to be more precise, I felt they were cheating their consumers. Lets be very professional here. I've blotted out the name in order to save guard the restaurant.


When you first look at this voucher it says CRAZY FOOD OFFER... 1 For 1. But if you look at the bottom right corner of the voucher, 2 things stand out. First off, it says Saturday & Sunday Only... and of course Terms and Conditions apply. No problem with the first condition...

Most businesses always try to draw business towards their slower times and maybe for this restaurant this could be the case. But, let's take a look at the back portion of this voucher.


If you take a look at bullet number four you will notice this statement there, valid for dine-in only with a minimum spending of RM 100 (i.e. USD 27.00). My point of contention is this, for you to be able to spend RM 100 when your food meals are half priced would mean that you would probably have to order an appetizer and desert and probably booze.

So if I'm going to half to spend a minimum or RM 100 before I can get my meals at Half price then why bother giving me the discount at all...

The point is this, if you are going to create a value promotion of any kind, its important to take note of a few points:

1) That you can actually afford to and are willing to give such a discount. 50% off meals from my experience is quite a hefty discount.


2) Try not to have terms and conditions which are too stringent. If not, my bet is that the promotion will most likely not be very successful.

The above example of the restaurant clearly contradicts these 2 points, having me fork out RM 100 before I qualify to use the voucher only tells me either that the restaurants is not able to really give this kind of discounts or they are not very sincere in their marketing by inserting such ridiculous terms. Either way, my feeling is that this campaign may not do very well.

So, a good thing to remember is that in delivering value, more often than not this can be a double edge sword, do it right and you'll have a tremendous increase in sales. Be too stringent and the promotion will probably fail and could possibly hurt your brand image. Till next time.