Treasure hunts can be great fun. We run one every month in Prim Perfect magazine, and we publicise it on our blog – with Qwis Greenwood writing her store reviews of all the places that contain clues.
Clues. Not freebies. In the Prim Perfect treasure hunt, you travel the grid to look around the stores, find the key object and … collect its prim count. No freebie. Add up your prim counts, and there’s a special prize – a free month in our specially designed townhouse, apartment, cottage … and then you get to take the furniture home at the end of the month. And runners-up get to rifle through our prize cupboard – a range of beautiful objects donated by designers.
But no freebies.
The reason for this is that we want people to go to stores and look at what is available there. The first month we ran the hunt, we hid Prim Perfect tokens in the stores, and we realised this wasn’t working. People were walking through stores ignoring the furniture and just looking for tokens. By making the clue an item in the store, we made participants look at what was actually on sale. And even, sometimes, buy things.
But now there are a plethora of treasure hunts with freebie prizes and blogs supporting them. In many cases, no longer do people walk through the stores carefully looking for the prize. No, they get the information from a blog, teleport in, grab the prize and depart, totally ignoring the store itself. And then complain vociferously if the freebie is not up to their standards.
One popular and highly-regarded furniture makers swear they will never participate in a treasure hunt again. The experience was, they say, a nightmare. People would teleport in and SHOUT across the sim, demanding to know where the freebie was. At first, the store-owners had, thinking this was the spirit of the thing, placed it unobtrusively so that people needed to walk some way round the store to find it. But after conversations with genuine customers had been disrupted numerous times by people on the freebie hunt, they placed it right by the main teleport. And then they had people complaining because it had moved from the place where a blog said it would be. In the end they withdrew from the hunt altogether, but although the hunt organisers removed them from the list, the blogs still sent people to the store and, when they found a sign saying that the store was no longer participatung, on several occasions the treasure hunters became abusive.
All in all, a device that was meant to attract people to the store became a liability, with trade being lost.
And something that seems to be growing is a sense of entitlement. Stores should not only provide freebies for a treasure hunt – they should provide GOOD freebies. High quality freebies – that may have taken many hours to produce in Photoshop. Because, if they don’t, fear the wrath of the frustrated treasure hunter!
I recently read a blog comment where someone stated that she would never shop with one big designer again after the designer created what she called ‘an exceedingly poor and insulting set of freebies’. Hang on a minute here. This designer created a set of freebies – more than one. There’s a lot of work there, in creating, packaging, placing. A commitment in terms of time and energy – that could have been spent on making things set for sale. But instead the designer chose to put these out for free for his or her group. Maybe not all of them suited everyone. But no designer is putting out a set of freebies with the intent of alienating customers.
I’ve collected freebies in Treasure Hunts in my time, some of which I’ve promptly junked, others of which I’ve stashed and worn. I’ve worn some of Ivalde‘s freebies on the TV show – the adorable Norwegian costume she made for the Globe Hunt at Christmas, for example. I’m really grateful for the little freebie ‘thank you’s I get, just as I appreciate the sterling efforts that Zasa Rossini of La Belle Vie puts into marketing, with her regular freebies for her customers. Many designers make the effort to reward loyal customers, whether with occasional freebies, like Colleen Desmoulins of The Loft or prize draws when they bring out something new, like Sofia Standish of Sofia’s Furniture. And this is great.
But the term ‘scavenger hunt’ has now become rather too apposite for a lot of what is happening. And the worse the sense of entitlement expressed by a vociferous minority grows, the more designers will just back away from treasure hunts, or place out freebies that really are mediocre because, if all they get is abuse, why bother?
I was in a lovely store this morning, the first day of a treasure hunt, and I greeted people as they arrived, and asked, very politely, if they liked the lovely furniture on display. I was either ignored (which, in a way, is fair enough – they not speak English or may have thought I was batty) or had the responses like this:
Saffia: Are you a fan of xx’s furniture?
Treasure Hunter: never hurd of it
and
Saffia Widdershins: Hi! Are you a fan of xx’s furniture?
2nd Treasure Hunter: mm. nop
Are these people really going to come back and buy? Or are they just going to grab what they can and never come back – until the next treasure hunt?
Prim Perfect 