Thank you stpauler for going straight to the source!
Again, I think it is great they are donating the money to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
I just think this is a scam, in that they are not truly letting the donations go on unlimited. One would think they would be pleased to sell an additional 50,000,000 or more yogurts, and therefor be more than willing to add that to their core amount.
I don’t mean to pry, but out of curiosity, how did your mother react to this viewpoint of their promotion? (You don’t have to answer this if it puts you or your mother in a compromising corporate position!)
I just gave her a second call and asked her what she thought. She was pretty shocked that this promotion wasn’t solely viewed as altruistic. Then she started talking tangetally about the boxtops for schools program and how that works pretty much the same way as that has a cap too. The promotions have a certain allotted budge amount that they decide on at the beginning and so anything after the capped amount is pure profit. She works in a different marketing department for General Mills but said that this is just a way of merchandising the yogurt and that they’re promoting the research for the cure for breast cancer. (One can tell that she’s been working in corporate america for too long).
She also said she’s going to try and get a boilerplate* to me and I’ll post it here when I get it. (*I guess it’s a term for the media release information for this promo).
In all fairness to General Mills, they do do a lot of corporate sponsorship in the Twin Cities especially in the arts sector, give out free snacks during the AIDS walk and more.
Thanks for the legwork, stpauler. I’m still mildly surprised that they bother to count up the lids at all, seeing as the company plans to donate the money regardless of how many lids they get–it seems like a waste of resources to me.
The idea of using “donations as merchandising” doesn’t bother me, as so many companies do it. After all, $2 million is a pretty decent chunk of change, even for the size of a company like General Mills. (Giving USA, the big philanthropy annual, treats anything $5 million and up as an extremely large gift, to put it in context.) It is a little, well, “oogey” for Yoplait to pull at customers’ emotions so strongly: “Send us your lids or we’re getting no closer to the cure!” Kind of like Wal-Mart’s loathsome “Good Works” campaign.
“Considering we guarantee a min. donation of around $830M, I don’t think it’s a hoax! And yes, we may encourage consumers to buy product but that still doesn’t lighten the fact that we have given almost $10MM to breast cancer research in the past 6 years or so. I’m sure Yoplait has something they hand-out to nay-sayers…YOPLAITEMPLOYEENAME, can you help?”
OK…they don’t listen well.
No one ever said it was a hoax. Nobdy doubts for a minute that a donation will be made…trust me, the Susan B. Kormen Foundation are no fools and will be looking for that check in the mail! I said SCAM, in that they have put a cap on the amount of money to be donated, thus making the real value of each label less and less until it is worth squat.
Also, glad to hear you have dontated $10 Million over the past 6 years…in other words, your accountants have figured out what your charitable donations should be each year, and with inflation and all, this year it is $2 Million. We got that already.
And as far as being a nay-sayer, well…I am a yeah-sayer when it comes to your actual donation.
I am a strong nay-sayer when it comes to forcing your customers to unnecessarily jump through hoops.
I wouldn’t say its a scam since the information is pretty much freely available and the company intends to do exactly as it says: give XMillion to a charity.
Scam: to cheat or swindle (also: to fraud).
Where is the customer cheated or defrauded here? At worst it is a form of misdirection, as is nearly all advertising. I guess it just doesn’t bother me that they’re using the promotion to raise sales, as you noted in the OP.
Well, I don’t see how that’s a “scam.” If Yoplait offered to give $.10 a lid to the Komen Foundation, then reneged on the pledge or claimed that they received fewer lids than they actually did, now that would be a scam. As it is, everybody involved–company, foundation, and consumers–know the rules of the promotion. Any consumer can also check the Yoplait website to see if they’ve reached the cap or not. When they have, the promotion is over, because those are the stated ground rules.
By your estimation, a promotion such as “we will sell to the first 20 customers tomorrow at half-price” would be a scam too. You could argue that the store knows they’re going to get more than 20 customers tomorrow, so Customer #21 is going to be out in the cold. But why would they be under any obligation to exceed the parameters of their sale?
I can see how you might feel that it’s an unnecessary hoop to jump through (and I would tend to agree), but I can’t see how it would be a scam, since they do actually donate the money just like they say.
I’m sure General Mills doesn’t want to run into the Pepsi Harrier jet problem–for example, by having a school think that they could fund their whole budget with boxtops or something like that.
With the boxtops, since you are “donating” to individual schools, it makes more sense–you give the boxtops to your school, and they redeem them. That way, General Mills knows which schools its consumers support. However, with the Yoplait promotion, all the donations are going to the same place, so it makes less sense to me to make people clean off yogurt lids and send them in.