Jeep promotion causes outrage
Jeep’s novel car promotion has caused a barrage of complaints with disappointed participants calling it a sham.
Jeep Australia devised a clever stunt to promote its new Cherokee by creating a mystery pop-up dealership in the Australian desert.
The competition, which finished at 9am today, promised to give away 10 Jeeps - worth $39,999 - for just $10,000.
To enter, participants had to download a special phone app and register by this morning, when the location and phone number of the mystery dealership was to be revealed.
The first 10 people to call up and then prove they had the $10,000 were to be crowned the winners – provided they made it to the dealership on Saturday July 26.
Within the first 10 days of launching the deal, 40,000 people had already registered by downloading the app.
But last night the secret phone number was revealed and posted to a Whirlpool user forum, causing a flurry of activity online.
Jeep then admitted to a glitch in the app, posting on Facebook once they had it back up and running.
They then added an extra twenty seconds to the cut-off time to supposedly give all applicants a fairer chance.
Since the promotion expired this morning, two Facebook groups have appeared with complaints about the phone number never appearing on the app as promised, or phone calls going unanswered
According to Jeep, hundreds of thousands of phone calls were made to the ‘remote dealership’.
Fiat Chrysler director of marketing Mark McCraith told news.com.au they did everything they could to ensure the competition ran according to plan.
“We always welcome engagement with our brand but unfortunately we can’t sell 30,000 cars at $10,000 or we would go out of business.”