Build-A-Bad-Promotion

When my nieces were young, I did some time in Build-A-Bear, the shop where you can make yourself a tarted-up stuffed animal. It was actually fun letting the girls pick the skinned plush carcass of their animal of choice, watch it get stuffed and sewn up, and pick an outfit out for it. Cute enough. I enjoyed it. But I remember it as pretty pricey – especially when you considered the quality, which was not exceptionally high.

Anyway, someone came up with what I’m sure they thought was an excellent promotional idea: a Pay Your Age sale. I.e., to get the basics – a stuffed animal with no extras – you only need to pony up three bucks for a three year old, six bucks for a six year old etc. (There must be a break-even age, of course. Surely, if I wanted to build myself a unicorn or whatever, I wouldn’t have to pay $68 for it.)

Word started circulating excitedly on Twitter a few days ago that “Build-A-Bear” was about to have a huge “Pay Your Age” sale. For one day only, the cuddlies would be sold not for the usual price, but for the dollar equivalent of the age of the lucky child, as long as the child was present on the premises. (Source: Wapo)

As a promotion goes, this one actually sounded like a pretty good one. After all, it’s the add-ons that add to the cost, not the bare-naked bear. All those enticing sounds, smells, costumes, and accessories? It goes without saying that any kid is going to want plenty o’that.

But apparently Build-a-Bear, which has claimed to sell “smiles” rather than products  - pardon me while I, as a marketing pro, gag; just like Revlon selling “hope” and not lipstick – underestimated the lure of this promo.

On Thursday, smiles faded at the company’s stores across the U.S., Canada and Britain after a big Build-A-Bear sale drew such large crowds — with lines up to a mile long and waits of 5 to 7 hours, sometimes for nothing — that the great stuff-your-own-bear company had to stuff the sale.

There is nothing on this good earth that I’d wait 5 hours in line to purchase, even at an extreme discount. Let alone a stuffed bear in a fireman’s outfit.

In Leeds, England, the police were called in.  One shopper described the situation as “chaos.” In Charlotte, NC, the words were “Black Friday-like frenzy.” In Raleigh, it was “carnage”, with “mobs of kids (and moms) in tears.”

So Build-a-Bear tweeted out an alert:

Per local authorities, we cannot accept additional Guests at our locations due to crowd safety concerns. We have closed lines in our stores. We understand some Guests are disappointed and we will reach out directly as soon as possible.

If I don’t like products being referred to as “smiles”, and lipstick as “hope”, I really and truly despise customers being referred to as guests. One thing if you’re in a hotel. Stretching it, but okay. After all, you are sleeping in their beds. In your very own-for-the-night private room. At a Build-a-Bear you’re in a swarm of other people, with the pestery-kid-to-adult-ratio of 3:1, all gearing up to put a tutu and a baseball cap on a pink dinosaur. You are not a guest. Guests don’t stand in mile-long lines for 5 hours. Those are customers.

And nutso customers at that.

I understand that you don’t want to disappoint the little ones, but this is a perfect example of being able to offer those little ones multiple life lessons. First lesson: it’s really a dumb-ass waste of time to wait 5-7 hours in line, under a broiling sun, to purchase something that the kid won’t give a stuffed rat’s ass about within 24 hours of stuffing the rat. Second lesson, courtesy of the Stones: You can’t always get what you want.

Build-a-Bear had to jump into (re)action, offering their turned away “guests” a $15 voucher.

Inevitably, Twitter did what Twitter does best: deliver some hilarious posts on the situation:

Gotta love Big Mouth Princess@BigMouthPrincss, who tweeted:

NASA now reporting they can see the queues outside Build A Bear Workshops from space.

And multi props go to local news guy from Boston’s very own WBZ:

“My kids love Build-A-Bear,” tweeted one David Wade. “When I saw they were having a ‘pay your age’ promotion I thought to myself: ‘I’d rather have someone cut my chest open with a spork and insert a plastic heart that makes a fake heartbeat noise’ than be there for that. It was a good call.”

Excellent instincts, David, excellent instincts.

I don’t imagine that Build-a-Bear will be running this promotion again anytime soon. But marketer to marketer, let me offer this: how about a Pay Your Age deal tied to the kid’s birthday? Maybe do it by the month, and have it be the Pay Your Age for the year before, just to let the parents think they were getting a deal. You’d spread the crowds throughout the year, and you’d probably sell a lot more of those add-on plastic hearts.