Misleading , Deceptive, Uninformed, or Just Plain dishonest Blog Posts

After New Year’s it’s always fun for me to sit back and review all the articles and blog posts that I never got a chance to read over the Christmas and New Year’s madness. While I thoroughly love the madness of the holidays, it certainly isn’t conducive to intellectual pursuits, at least not for me.


When I do get the chance to go through my inbox, and RSS Feeds, I inevitably run across articles and posts that go out of their way to hold gift cards in a negative light.

This time of year has a lot of articles on gift cards, and they become fodder for those traditional merchandise incentive companies who just itch at the opportunity to use them to distort the truth. They do this I surmise, because they sell traditional merchandise awards, the antithesis of gift card incentive awards. They do it because gift cards constantly undermine their profits. They do it because clients are constantly asking them for gift card options and they are constantly thinking of ways to tell those clients that gift cards are just not a good award option for reasons that are always less than transparent.

It is obvious to anyone who compares the two award options that gift cards make traditional merchandise award items look outrageously expensive. And the choice of awards between gift cards and the online merchandise catalogs are not even comparable. So these companies in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the evil gift card empire jump at the chance to relay anything remotely negative they see in print as gospel. It’s a shame they have to stoop to this depth in order to make their products look better.

Let me give you an example. This blog post from a recognition award supplier headquartered in both Canada and the US appeared in December. As the vast majority of their readership is obviously from the US, I found it somewhat ridiculous when it mentioned that “only 17% of us wanted gift cards”. I guess the Canadians are far different from their US cousins as according to what I read “gift cards are the most requested gifts for the holiday season for the fourth consecutive year.” Of course the writer of the blog was the president of the company…you don’t think he had an ulterior motive for making the statement, do you? He went on to the brilliant deduction “that another reason gift cards aren’t used is because they are not appreciated. I also believe the same thing holds true in corporate recognition programs.” That’s an interesting deduction as every survey I’ve seen conducted by Incentive Magazine over the last several years shows that gift cards are by far the #1 award in the recognition industry. I guess he must have missed those.

One last thing, he refers to the article in the Toronto Globe as breakage on “gift cars” as being close to 25% including non-redemption because of expiration dates and fees, he might be correct. Trouble is, the vast majority gift cards used in the majority of recognition programs, are merchant gift cards that don’t have expiration dates, or any of the high fees that bank cards have (Visa, Mastercard or Amex) and are therefore more likely to cost less than 10%, not the 25% he claims. Of course that is all a moot point as the price of the precious merchandise he is so fond of is averaged at least 50% higher than retail and has been for years. Gee if he is so keen on presenting facts I wonder why he didn’t mention that one?

A couple years back I attended the largest incentive buyer’s show in the industry. While there I was introduced to a buyer from this company. She was very interested in gift cards as being an added choice in their programs because so many of their customers wanted them. I sent her some information, but on a call back she simply said she couldn’t afford to have them, not because it’s not what their customers wanted, but because they were afraid to add them as too many would take the option and she would lose a tremendous amount of their high margin merchandise business. Guess there is someone in that company who believes in transparency, but just doesn’t want to tell the buyers!