American Express and the art of the useless promotion

Amex sent an interesting offer around to its British Airways Premium Plus American Express cardholders last week. It is, apparently, their ‘hottest ever offer’. We can only hope that isn’t true.

Basically, if you spend £3,500 in November, December AND January (each month, not in total), you will earn 3,500 bonus Avios. Whoopee.

This promotion is so wrong in so many ways that it beggers belief that Amex is running it. Is it really so hard to get anyone with business or marketing skills to work in Brighton?!

For the benefit of any Amex employees reading, here is the first rule of loyalty programmes. The point of a loyalty scheme is to drive additional business from a customer above what they would normally bring you. It is NOT purely about delivering a fixed amount of spending – if it was, airline loyalty schemes would be based on £ spent rather than complex mechanisms like tier points.

The internet and modern technology makes it even easier to target people properly, which is what makes this Amex promo especially inept.

Take me and my wife as an example. We both have a BA Amex. Both are currently sat in a desk drawer, because we have triggered our 2-4-1’s and we have cards which are more effective for day-to-day spending than the BA Amex (old BMI Mastercards earning 2 miles per £1).

Amex knows this. They could very easily have sent us a promo offering 3,500 Avios for spending £3,500 IN TOTAL over the next 3 months. That would, after all, have been £3,500 more each than we will otherwise be spending with Amex. I would definitely have got the cards out of the desk for that offer.

Or, perhaps, they could have asked for £10,500 of spending over 3 months CUMULATIVELY instead of £3,500 for each of 3 months. As we have a big holiday in December, I could have achieved that and may have dug my card out. It makes no difference to Amex after all, they still get the same commission. But they didn’t do that, so the card stays in the desk.

(Who spends £3,500 in January anyway, unless they are off on holiday?!)

Finally, the reward offered here in no way measures up to the effort required. 3,500 bonus Avios for spending £10,500? That is only a 20% bonus on the 16,500 Avios points I would have earned anyway. And unless I was spending far above £3,500 each month, I would need to dedicate some time to making sure that transactions were posting in the right month and possibly moving spending from one month to the next. 3,500 Avios does not even begin to make the effort worthwhile.

And, of course, without wishing to state the obvious:

Spend £10,500 on the premium BMI Amex at 2 Avios per £1 and you get 21,000 Avios

Spend £10,500 on the premium BA Amex – jumping through all the hoops, balancing out your spend etc – and you only get 19,250 Avios!

The offer isn’t even good enough to make it worthwhile switching the BMI Amex for the BA Amex.

Really Amex … you must try harder.

(To see our complete list of all current credit card bonuses, click here to visit our ‘Credit Cards Update’ page or use the link in the menu bar at the top of the page.)