Why is every promo item campaign such a mess?

Whoever is in charge of developing FFXIV promotional campaigns need to seriously re-evaluate their processes.

Grubhub Pizza Emote: complete mess that required spending a lot of money to not get a code, go through a lot of additional support calls to both Grubhub & SE before resolving.

Butterfinger mount: Buy 10 butterfingers, take a photograph of the reciept and email it to someone who looks at it and then emails you a code to redeem. Most painless of the promos but I did hear of a lot of people have more trouble than I did.

Mountain Dew Zu: Post and Mt Dew page for code redemption went live and provided codes that we're not valid until DT release. Took them a while to update the pages and emails to state this. Caused a lot of confusion. Site "Sold out" of mount codes before event ended.

Gong Cha mount promo: Vendor has limited locations in the US, many fans would have to drive 2+ hours to reach a location. Not all locations are participating, GongCha's US website has no mention of promo, many locations have no phone number listed to call & ask without additional searching outside vendor's site. $24 for 3 participating drinks which gets you EITHER a keychain OR scratch off code card for promo mount.

I feel like nearly ever promo has been a savage trial to accomplish. Don't even get me started on promo items included with one time run items from SE's store...

It's because SE does not organize these, they provide the prizes and codes, but these companies are doing these promotions and they're used to the customer base being pretty lax about their promotions.
No one is going to be too pressed about a mountain dew t shirt from a promo messing up. FFXIV players are way more invested and have expectations others don't and the companies aren't prepared for. Also with most of those a big holdup is that the company vastly underestimates their sales and doesn't order enough codes from SE until they have mad players blowing up their customer service department.

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

It's because SE does not organize these, they provide the prizes and codes, but these companies are doing these promotions and they're used to the customer base being pretty lax about their promotions.

Also with most of those a big holdup is that the company vastly underestimates their sales and doesn't order enough codes from SE until they have mad players blowing up their customer service department.

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If the north American management allowed to organize these promo event in Asia, they probably will see their storefront burnt down in 2 days by fans. These kind of promotions for well known games are serious business overthere.

*cries in EU*

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Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

Gong Cha is a very Square Enix-style company. They have three apps in the US that each cover different stores: one for the Northeast, one for other stores in the Northeast and elsewhere in the US, and a third for stores in Illinois, Nevada and Louisiana. The first two are running the promo but the third one isn't. Suffice to say, there's a great reason why Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. partnered with this company because they are a great fit for each other. As expected!

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Wait, so the stores in Illinois aren't even doing the promo?? Well, that saved me a trip.

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Originally Posted by Doki

Whoever is in charge of developing FFXIV promotional campaigns need to seriously re-evaluate their processes.

Grubhub Pizza Emote: complete mess that required spending a lot of money to not get a code, go through a lot of additional support calls to both Grubhub & SE before resolving.

Butterfinger mount: Buy 10 butterfingers, take a photograph of the reciept and email it to someone who looks at it and then emails you a code to redeem. Most painless of the promos but I did hear of a lot of people have more trouble than I did.

Mountain Dew Zu: Post and Mt Dew page for code redemption went live and provided codes that we're not valid until DT release. Took them a while to update the pages and emails to state this. Caused a lot of confusion. Site "Sold out" of mount codes before event ended.

Gong Cha mount promo: Vendor has limited locations in the US, many fans would have to drive 2+ hours to reach a location. Not all locations are participating, GongCha's US website has no mention of promo, many locations have no phone number listed to call & ask without additional searching outside vendor's site. $24 for 3 participating drinks which gets you EITHER a keychain OR scratch off code card for promo mount.

I feel like nearly ever promo has been a savage trial to accomplish. Don't even get me started on promo items included with one time run items from SE's store...

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Also, rules and conditions are not made obvious. E.g. what they announce, in the case of recently the Mountain Zu, is "collect a few codes from bottle caps and enter the codes to get the mount", but what is actually implemented is, "create a personal account with the Mountain Dew company and fill out forms with all your personal details including real life address and phone numbers to be able to participate at all, and after you do that, you may still not actually get a code but we're keeping your data".

I have found in the case of several promotions that they seem to have in common a requirement to create accounts on, and submit personal data to, platforms I do not want to be on.

The Amazon promotions were always the least painful. You just bought like, $20 in gaming stuff on Amazon and stuff that was part of the promotion was clearly labeled. You got an email with the code immediately too. Was nice and easy.

When about 90+% of the region isn't able to participate in the so-called promotion due to a lack of participating stores -either from no stores in area, or the stores in that area not being a part of it, can it really be called a promotion for the NA?

I mean i'm in my 30s but for my entire history this is how every promo has worked ever, for any promo for anything not just ff14. You aren't always able to gain access to them, and some of them have been given out as prizes in other places eventually as well for a chance for you to obtained ones you missed. This is not a SE related issue, nor is it a problem that only SE has.