Baggage Claim – Which Bag is yours?

Recently I have been following up on several requests for information from my AwardEmployees or AwardSafety blog sites, or from our new product site, Award of Choice. For this I am most thankful. It keeps an old man active and occupied and allows me to stay in touch with clients and what’s happening in the world of incentives and recognition.

Unfortunately it also reminds me of the disingenuousness and blatant dishonesty that persists in this industry. Maybe it’s the times or the economic struggles that everyone seems to be going through, or maybe it’s an industry that is replete with sales types that just don’t know what they are doing. I’ve seen some of this over the years, but for the most part the industry has many great professionals who attempt to sell their products and make their pitch based on the facts that support their recommendations.

Every day I speak with potential clients who are constantly being misled by a vendor in order to sell their product. Frankly that puts me at a decided disadvantage…that of having to be in a position to say that the competitor is duplicitous or at worst out and out lying. All I can do is present my products to the best of my ability and be as transparent as I can be. In fact I too often give them more information then they require in order that they completely understand my deliverables and what they will and won’t do. I was taught that was the best way to sell, to put the truth on the line and let the chips fall where they may. Sometimes I win, sometimes not, but I have clients who have been with my for years and I believe it’s because every step along the way I was as transparent as I could bet. All vendors claim to be award neutral, but that is just not true. They all have an axe to grind and will do all they can to sell you their own product, even if it’s just not the one you really need.

Smoke and mirrors pricing could have been invented in the incentive industry, we certainly have enough of it. But when a client is given the task to compare vendors for recognition or incentive awards and is not given all the facts, these deceptive smoke and mirrors pricing schemes can be very difficult to unveil. If you’re in the position to purchase or compare awards programs, I encourage you to do all you can to gain as many facts about the competitive products as possible. Every phase of the business has multiple vendors and it’s often very difficult to determine the one that should be yours. It’s kind of like standing around baggage claim after long and tedious flights looking for which bag is really yours…they all look alike but only one has the stuff inside it that you want.

If you’re just not getting all the answers that you want from your vendors, and can’t make the comparisons necessary for you to make a sound decision, you may want to look into an outside incentive consultant. There are some good ones out there, one I’ve heard great things about is I2I Incentive Intelligence. It could be worth $1000’s in savings to your company to get a better program and a better award to suit your needs.

Be Well, Be Happy, Hug Someone!

There Is No Best Award!

Our friend Paul Hebert makes some excellent points in this post on his blog Incentive Intelligence. It’s too bad that more clients don’t listen to this kind of advice when they plan their incentive programs, if they did their participants would be more productive and earn awards that they wanted and they would have better programs that produced better result.
We have often railed on gift cards being the “best” reward in the incentive industry because we are tired of traditional award companies foisting traditional merchandise awards on companies at pricing that is, well frankly ridiculous! That doesn’t mean that we don’t think that merchandise awards are not great awards, they are! A gift card is nothing but a conveyance to get merchandise of every variety, shape, size, color, etc., at prices that are fair market retail so participants can receive real value for the company’s budget.

A great majority of incentive programs these days are points based electronic programs where the participants earn some form of “currency” or “points” that are banked for redemption on an ongoing basis or in the future. These bank programs include an “awards mall” that, in our perspective, should include as many different types of awards as possible to give the participant the choice of something that fits their lifestyle need of the moment. The categories can be many and varied. they can start with a catalog of traditional merchandise, have travel options, airline ticketing, special lifestyle awards such as days at the spa, or hot air ballooning and of course a very large array of gift card merchants such as found at Award of Choice.

When the traditional merchandise companies control the electronic platform they are very reluctant to add other categories for the simple reason that when they do, the vast majority of redemption will go to these other choices, especially gift cards. In these cases the companies will lose substantial profit.

But isn’t letting the participant choose the award that they really want the objective in the first place? All the major consumer loyalty programs do that, why don’t more companies do that for employee programs?

Be Well, Be Happy, Hug Someone!

Are Years of Service Award Programs Passé?

The differences that various employee award vendors have in the way they view employee recognition programs and in particular employee years of service awards, can be startling. And the unsuspecting client is caught in the middle.

On one hand you have the major traditional years of service award companies who frankly have done very little to change their award selections in over 50 years. On the other hand we have the avant-garde new players in the incentive industry who have and will provide a wide range of diverse awards to satisfy the needs of a totally different type of diverse work force than we’ve ever seen.

In a recent review of the Ask the Experts section in Incentive Magazine I was bemused to see the answer to the question “Several recent articles say that service awards are from Henry Ford’s era and are no longer relevant. Are service awards passé?” As it should have been, it was answered by an expert in the industry, but one who runs a traditional years of service award company. The answer was purely from that perspective, and those traditional companies rarely offer awards that differ from what they’ve offered for decades Had it been a two part answer, one from the traditional companies and one from a new player in the industry, you would have been given a much broader perspective of the issues and be better armed to make a decision on the type of program you want to implement.

In reality are service awards passé? The easy answer is yes, and no. The ones that haven’t changed since our fathers and grandfathers time are, the ones that have tried to grow with the times are not as much, and the ones that have incorporated the wide variety of award options definitely are.

Be Happy, Be Well, Hug Someone!

Do Gift Card Employee Awards Have Trophy Value?

The nice folks who sell traditional merchandise awards would have you believe that gift cards when used as employee incentive or recognition awards have no trophy value. They purport that gift cards do not provide the intrinsic value or the tangible evidence of success provided by the traditional high priced merchandise awards given to our parents and grandparents. To this we simply say......HOGWASH, PROVE IT! There is no empirical evidence to support this claim, and never has been. It is another smoke screen to demonize gift cards and turn unsuspecting buyers toward their own award products. You see, they can’t stand the idea of selling gift cards as options to their merchandise simple because they haven’t figured out how to make any money doing it.

In our ongoing attempt to defend gift cards against the onslaught of those who would have you believe such tripe let us offer the following and let you decide if gift cards have trophy value and are a symbol of success.

You see, gift cards are not gift cards. When your participants get to choose the gift card that they want, they are to the holder the same kind of dreams and desires that used to be generated by the coffee table award books of the 1960’s. Except they have far more appeal to the workers of today than any other award. Gift cards are the stylish new outfit seen in the window at Macy’s; they are the new wide screen plasma HDTV at Best Buy, they are the deluxe Barbecue shown on sale at Home Depot, they are a child’s bike at Wal-Mart; they are the beautiful diamond necklace offered at Costco. They are all these things and millions and millions more. The only real difference between them and merchandise used in traditional award programs is that with a gift card, for the budget you have, your participant will be able to get a larger TV plus a DVD probably two bikes, the new outfit plus a glamorous sweater, a grandfather clock and a watch, and they may still have money left over. The decision is yours. Do you think they provide trophy value?

Be Well, Be Happy, Hug Someone.