While John Sergeant’s departure from Strictly Come Dancing is big news, another smaller story is bubbling under. The One Show, which is presented by John Sergeant and still-in-the-running SCD contender Christine Bleakley, offered its viewers a free Strictly Come Dancing T-shirt back on 10 October.  Since then, the show’s message board has filled up with complaints.

The announcers did say that it would be first come, first served but the 3,000 teeshirts (1,500 for ‘Team Bleakley’ and 1,500 for ‘Team Sergeant’) had gone within minutes and then the many people who logged on to try and get one found the website had crashed under the volume of logins.

While promotional items, especially free ones, are an excellent way to get attention for a business or a new idea, it’s important to make sure that offering a freebie doesn’t lead to large numbers of disappointed people who will then feel cheated and possibly complain vociferously. Failure to meet people’s expectations can lead to them losing confidence in your service and efficiency, which is the exact opposite of what promotional clothing is designed to achieve.

If you are offering a giveaway on a website, it’s a good idea to have a ‘counter’ so the people who log in can see immediately if there are 50 or 5 or no T-shirts left, rather than having to go through a complex login process only to feel cheated at the end.  If your giveaway is an onsite one, either say you’ll be running the giveaway for a set period of time (half an hour is plenty) or if its an all day event, say the giveaway will take place for the first five minutes of every hour, to spread customer attention over the whole period.

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