Sometimes you have to blame yourself!
South Africa’s infatuation with consumer rights seems to be spiralling out of control. We agree that many big companies employ unethical marketing and sales tactics to exploit the poor and ignorant; but don’t believe consumers should be absolved of all bl
The result is that many Vodacom customers have ‘lost’ thousand of rand. Although the competition is almost over, the National Lotteries Board is now in on the act. Alerted by various media reports they allege that Vodacom is running an illegal lottery and have threatened to take the matter to court.
How to blow R48 000
Court action or not, it will be too late for those customers who got carried away. The Rapport newspaper recently carried a story about one such individual who spent R48 000 on entries to the competition. A 37 year old woman was also reportedly R27 000 in the red… And there must be hundreds who have dropped a thousand rand or more.
An example of the SMS soliciting entries to the competition reads: “The clock is counting down – Don’t miss this chance to win an amazing BMW 320i from Vodacom – Simply SMS “Yebo” to 3###7 – R10 an SMS – Free opt-out – SMS “Stop” to 3###0.” Is this plea really compelling enough to ‘force’ someone to enter a competition 4 800 times? We don’t think an individual who bashes the send button on his cellphone with such dedication deserves any sympathy.
While we maintain that customers should answer for their actions we cannot totally exonerate Vodacom. One of our concerns is how Vodacom could allow any of its users to amass bills as high as R48 000. They have a sophisticated billing infrastructure which should cut the subscription (or at the very least result in human intervention) well before such totals are reached. There is no doubt Vodacom wanted its subscribers to partake in the competition as much as possible. Shameel Joosub, managing director of Vodacom SA told SAFM “The way the competition works – obviously the more entries you have into the competition, the more chances you have to win the car.”
Money for nothing
Many irate Vodacom subscribers believe they have been fleeced. But according to Joosub the competition was not about money: “The purpose of the competition was really to encourage the uptake of data and to really give back something to our customers – we gave R5m as part of the Christmas campaign to charity… so it was part of a whole bigger promotion,” he said. So it wasn’t about the money?
We find that hard to believe… Earlier during the discussion Joosub made this alarming statement: “I think we’ve had less than 5% of our customers actually take up the competition, and of those customers they generally sent an average two to three SMS’s per day.” Using the above admission, we performed a few basic calculations to establish how much money Vodacom could potentially rake in. We first determined how many customers could take part. Vodacom’s results to December 2007 show a total of 23.297m South African subscribers – of which 3.409m are contract subscribers. Let’s forget pre-paid fro the moment and consider that if five percent of the contract base responded to the competition there would have been 170 450 competition participants. If each competitor entered just once on a given day they would have a 1 in 170 450 chance of winning the car.
However, if each of these entrants sent three entries per day, Vodacom could have ‘banked’ R5.113m every 24 hours. And over the 100 days of the competition the group could take R511m in gross revenue… Even if Vodacom paid the full retail price for each of the 100 BMWs (a BMW 320i retails for around R271 500) they would still have netted a cool R484m! And that’s a huge amount to earn from a ‘promotion’
Editor’s thoughts:
We were quite surprised when we heard that the Lottery Board wanted to take Vodacom to task for running the competition. Apart from the fact the competition has practically run its course the Lottery Board’s track record is hardly something to write home about. Their recent attempts to end FNB’s million-a-month account failed dismally. Do you think Vodacom’s competition flouts the law; and are they to blame for the excessive amounts some of their customers spent? Add you comment below, or send an email to gareth@fanews.co.za
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