The intention
The US online portal 6PM, supplier of shoes, bags and consumer electronics positions itself as 'Your online outlet where everything's on sale'. This Amazon.com subsidiary is trying to expand its position in an industry where competition - especially in times of crisis - is using the 'always sale' concept.- is severe.
The approach
6PM accidentally mispriced hundreds of products in the online store due to a bug in the 'pricing engine'. During a time frame of 6 o'clock (midnight to 6 o'clock 'morning) were all products for 49.95 offered.
The result
Due to the wrong price management, many products such as expensive GPS systems and shoes ended up on the online portal, far lower the cost price. The result was a loss of $1.6 before anyone at 6PM.com noticed. The company honors all purchases made during the mispricing and takes its loss.
The lessons
This incident does raise the question of whether there was actually an error or a cleverly designed advertising campaign. Planned or not, the promotion resulted in a huge viral marketing campaign for 6PM. The news appeared almost immediately on the well-attended blog Gawker and soon after on top US sites like CNet News, Silicon Valley Watcher. That of course provides a huge exposure.
One critic argues that 6PM also strategically placed its coverage of the flaw in places where aggregation sites for news and social media posts could quickly pick them up…
No matter how you look at it; 6PM also indicates that people have gained more than lost. Public sympathy for the company has increased enormously. According to the law, the purchases should not have been honored.
Admitting mistakes openly and dealing sympathetically with these kinds of slips can therefore ultimately yield a lot of profit. It's good to have you as a marketer, CEO or entrepreneur to be aware of the value of goodwill and positive viral marketing in these kinds of situations. 6PM isn't the only company criticized by critics for deliberately staging mistakes to get good PR. This seems to be happening more and more. Think, for example, of the iPhone prototype that was found in a bar in Silicon Valley in April of this year and caused a real media hype..
Further:
www.gawker.com
www.6pm.com
Quote press release 6pm:
“This morning, we made a big mistake in our pricing engine that capped everything on the site at $49.95. The mistake started at midnight and went until around 6:00am pst. When we figured out the mistake was happening, we had to shut down the site for a bit until we got the pricing problem fixed.
While we’re sure this was a great deal for customers, it was inadvertent, and we took a big loss (over $1.6 million – ouch) selling so many items so far under cost. However, it was our mistake. We will be honoring all purchases that took place on 6pm.com during our mess up.”
Author: Editors Brilliant Failures
