We all know that there are many small difference between British English and other froms of English across the world. We call them fries, they call them chips. We say cookies, they say biscuits. But what you might not know is that they don't use same word for vacuuming as us!
In the UK the word for vacuuming is hoovering, and this is because the Hoover company that produces vacuums became so famous in the country, that the people started using the word hoover for a vacuum. In the same way that we say googling instead of searching.
Back in 1992, Hoover discovered that they had a surplus of vacuum cleaners in their warehouse, so they decided to hold a promotion to get rid of them.
Did they give customers 10% off, or maybe even 25%? No, they came up with the crazy idea of giving customers two round trip tickets to select European destinations for every person that spent at least £100!
And I know what you're thinking, how did they make any money off of that?
Round trip international flights are generally more expensive than buying a vacuum cleaner, so to keep things profitable Hoover came up with a plan.
First they would try to upsell anyone that tried to spend just the £100 minimum requirement, by upselling them accessories or a more expensive model.
And second they tried to limit the amount of tickets they had to give away by making the process to claim them so difficult and confusing that people would just give up.
So how did this process work?
After buying their vacuum, customers then had to mail in an application with their receipt to Hoover within 14 days.
Then Hoover would mail them a registration form that the customer had to fill out and mail back again within 14 days.
Then Hoover would mail them a travel voucher, and customers had to choose a point of departure, a date, and a destination.
The catch here was that Hoover could deny those choices, and then the customer could try again. If Hoover again denied their application, then the company would choose the flights themselves, and the customer could take it or leave it.
What an amazing plan, the company would either lose lots of money, or infuriate their customers to the point that they would never buy from the company again!
At first the plan worked though, all the surplus vaccums were being bought up, and only about 10% of customers actually received their tickets! Hoover had somehow gotten away with this, and the promotion was a success!
But then the company doubled down with a new offer.
They expanded the offer to include roundtrip flights to the US!
This promotion was actually insane! The average price of a roundtrip ticket to the US at the time was £600, the price of the cheapest vaccum was £120 and Hoover earned £30 of profit on each sale. That meant that for every person that redeemed a ticket, Hoover would lose £570!
But the promotion worked, it really worked! People were buying so many Hoover products that sales increased by more than 10x of what they had expected!
The surplus was long gone by now, and Hoover had to double their staff at their production plant to keep up with demand. But if all these customers would get their tickets, the company would lose millions! They sold 300.000 vacuums and if each customer got their tickets, they would make a loss of -£171 million!
Hoover desperately tried to do everything they could to deny people their flights. They said that thousands had filled out the forms wrong, they gave customers flights that departed hundreds of kilometers away from where they lived, and they sent out forms to customers on Christmas, in the hopes that the combination of mail closures and holiday distractions would keep people from responding within the 14 day requirement.
But this time Hoover wouldn't get away with it!
Customers figured out what the company had been doing, and formed the Hoover Holiday Pressure Group. They demanded that Hoover would honor the promotion, and not long after that the courts got involved. The final verdict was that Hoover had to honor all the promised tickets, and the company lost £42 million!
Not only did their promotion result in a huge financial loss, it also made all of their customers angry, and on top of that so many people had overbought vaccums during the campaign, that nobody needed to buy one for years!
In the end several executives were fired, the company was nearly bankrupted, and Hoover Europe was sold off to an Italian company called Candy.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this story!