Smart Thinking: Grab another Thresher's Wine Bargain

The Thresher's 40% discount wine offer is back on again - for one week only.

For those of you who missed it first time around, the original incarnation was a scheme dreamt up by Hugh MacLeod and his business partners at Stormhoek Wines. Simple idea: download a pdf voucher, take it into your local branch of Thresher's, get 40% off their entire wine range. Which really adds up if you're stocking up on Â£15 bottles of Chateau Neuf du Pape as a yuletide treat, I can tell you.

The rest is recent history: the voucher went viral, the media went into a frenzy - although a lot of papers and news progs for some reason insisted on reporting it as an 'error'; presumably they couldn't quite believe that anything doing so much good for all concerned could be planned and deliberate - and Thresher's reported that they'd notched up Â£15m in additional sales as well as clearing a lot of stock from their warehouse in the process.

And now it's back. As posted by Hugh last night on his gapingvoid blog, for a limited time only in the run up to Easter you can download the new voucher from the Stormhoek website, then march into your local Thresher's and get your 40% off all wines (champagne, sparkling and fortified wines excepted).

Jo and I will be going tonight on the way home from the gym, before they run out of Stormhoek Pinotage 2005, which is bloody marvellous stuff - goes with everything from a chicken shashlik to half a bar of Green & Black's dark & mint (and believe me, we've experimented with a fair few combinations...)

Edit 23.03.07: Did indeed call in to Thresher's on the way home last night. Sidled up to the counter and showed the chap behind the till the new voucher: "Are you taking... these?" I enquired. To which he replied:

"Oh, God, not again..."

Turns out this poor sod still bears the scars of the Xmas frenzy when, so he told me, he ended up holding the fort all-but single handed. "I'm not bloody going through that again..." he muttered as he picked up the phone to ring someone higher-up and check that the horrible rumours were true and that yes, indeed, that bastard MacLeod was about to ruin his life all over again...

I tried to win him over. "Hey, it's only for a week. And didn't Thresher's make an extra Â£15m in sales last time?"

"Oh, Aye!" this laced with an unspoken, yet quite distinct dose of 'yeah, but guess how much of it ended up in my pocket as a result, and after all the grief that I had to go through...'

His colleague who wandered in from the stock room at that point, seemed more sanguine about the whole thing when challenged about the return of voucher hell "Yeah, there was something about that on the memos for today." But then he tried to persuade me that their usual 'buy two, get one free' was actually a better deal. Immune to my counter-proposal that 33% off wasn't actually better than 40% off, he was on the verge of running through the calculations when I fled with my half dozen bottles of Stormhoek Shiraz (they didn't have the Pinotage, but the Shiraz is gorgeous so I was very happy indeed...)

"You'll need some more of these, I've cleaned the shelf out..." was my parting shot.

"Oh, Aye..."

I wonder. Is it a case of one staff member with a less-than-sunny disposition and bad memories of last time (the vouchers, the horrible vouchers!), or will Hugh's new deal not be quite as well-received by the front-line bottle-slingers as it will by the profit-counters at Head Office? A case of the joy not being spread far enough, goodwill bonus-wise, or just the usual "retail sucks, my job is crap, I wish I was dead" issues that you get almost everywhere..? Should Thresher's spend more time educating their staff on the joys of viral marketing, or should the guys and gals behind the counter just suck it up and get the heck on with it for the Good of the Company and, dammit, because it's their job to sell more wine?

Whatever. I'm six bottles of rather excellent wine at a very reasonable price to the good. My weekend's definitely looking up... :)

March 22, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 8 Comments

Smart thinking: Hugh MacLeod on Blogging

Hugh MacLeod is another smart cookie, and a bookmark for his gapingvoid blog, which I've been reading for about two years now, is one of only a very few that I keep in a folder marked 'READ EVERY DAY'.

© Hugh MacLeod He started out putting his cartoons online, then started talking about marketing, selling and so forth (he used to be in advertising) and he's been a pro-blogger and marketing-thinker for the past few years now.

In that relatively short space of time he's notched up a number of blog-related successes, such as turning Stormhoek Wines into an internationally-recognised brand (well, certainly among the geek-classes anyhow) and doing astounding things to the turnover of a Saville Row tailor via English Cut.

But perhaps most impressively - unless I've gotten hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick, which I admit is entrely possible - he played a deeply significant part in creating the pre-Xmas Thresher's wine voucher frenzy that enabled them to almost completely sell out of wine and champagne across their chain (thereby massively reducing their over-stock levels) on the back of an offer that was actually only 7% more than their standard '3 for 2' discount, and gaining massive national media coverage into the bargain. And all at practically zero cost, bandwidth charges notwithstanding.

And he still draws his cartoons as well... they're often extremely funny, very dry, very well observed.

So again, when someone like Hugh posts a collection of his distilled random thoughts on blogging then it's worth tuning in and paying attention.

I reckon anyone out there who is more than slightly serious about using their blog to do more than just think out loud online should pay particular attention to points #1, #3, #6, #18, #19 and #33. But read the rest as well, of course. Food for thought.