This is the Promotion Economics & Planning hub at Trevor Services: the operator’s view of the plan — prize ladders and claim completion from our file, permit thresholds and lead times, slippage and redemption forecasting, promotion insurance, timing and duration, budget maths, what a retailer needs to see before saying yes.
What does this pillar cover?
Every article below is written from our own campaign file and kept current. Start with the newest, or pick the question you are actually facing.
Every Promotion Economics & Planning article
- Why Some Promotions Get Retailer Support and Others Don’t — In winter 2026 Grant Burge ran two promotions for the same wine, in the same season, tied to the same football finals — and they weren’t the
- Hope vs Greed: Why Every Promotion Sells One or the Other — Put two promotions side by side and they can offer roughly the same value and still ask something completely different of the shopper. One s
- Reusing a Promotion Mechanic Is a Strategy — In Trevor’s own campaign records, one whitegoods client — Electrolux — has been running variations of the same cashback mechanic since 2020:
- Does a Bigger Promotion Prize Pool Get More Entries? — Five times the prize money bought nine per cent more entries. That’s the Grant Burge AFL Grand Final promotion, which ran this winter throug
- Sales Promotion Insurance: A Budget Hacker’s Tool — Every prize budget conversation eventually hits the same fork. Someone wants a headline prize big enough to stop the scroll, and someone els
- Appliance Cashback Promotions: Why Whitegoods Pay You Back — Look at what the whitegoods brands are running in Australia right now and you’d think cashback had gone out of fashion. In the appliance pro
- Self-Liquidating Premium Promotions: Who Runs Them Now — There are 182 promotions live in the Australian market as of this week, on the tracker Trevor Services keeps of campaigns as they go to shel
- Australian Promotion Benchmarks 2026 — Most promotional “benchmarks” are guesswork. These aren’t. They come from 63 promotional campaigns Trevor Services has run and fulfilled for
- How Long Should a Promotion Run? — Almost every promotional brief that reaches us has a duration in it, and almost every one of them is a single number. Eight weeks. Six weeks
- How Much Should a Promotion Prize Be Worth? — Three campaigns. Identical $20,000 prize pools. They finished on 52 entries, 67 entries and 3,768 entries. All three ran on the Trevor Servi
- Cashback or Prize Draw: Choosing the Right Mechanic — Eighty-nine of the promotions we’re tracking in Australian retail this morning are chance-based — 49 single prize draws, 40 instant wins. Tw
- What Is Slippage in a Cashback Promotion? — Somewhere in most cashback planning meetings, the offer gets costed at face value. A $100 cashback on a $1,000 appliance goes into the sprea
- How to Increase Promotion Entries: Cut the Friction — It happens a few times a year at Trevor Services: a promotion launches with a prize genuinely worth wanting, decent retail support behind it
- The Kill Sheet: Pressure-Testing a Promotion Before Launch — Most promotions that fail were always going to fail. Not because of bad luck or a soft market — because something in the design was broken b
- Slippage: Why a Cashback Costs Less Than a Discount — There’s a moment in most promotional budget conversations where a cashback and a discount get treated as the same thing. Both are “$100 off”
- Prize Pool Distribution: One Big Prize or Many? — Most prize budgets get argued over twice. First when someone decides how much to spend, and again — usually with less rigour — when someone
- The 3-Second Equation: How Shoppers Judge a Promo — Watch someone decide whether to enter a promotion and you’ll miss it if you blink. They see the flash — WIN A CAR, $10 cashback, scan to ent
- The Insult Threshold: When a Reward Isn’t Worth Claiming — Somewhere in a planning meeting right now, a brand team is arguing about whether a cashback should be $5 or $10. The $5 version protects the
- Self-Liquidating Premiums: When the Gift Pays for Itself — Most brands reach for a discount when they want to shift volume, because it’s the lever everyone understands. Knock a few dollars off the sh
- The One Job Rule: Why a Promotion Should Do One Thing — Look at most promotional briefs and you will find a wishlist. The campaign is meant to drive trial, reward loyal buyers, lift basket size, c
- Cashback or Prize Draw? How to Choose Your Promotional Mechanic — You’ve got approval for a winter promotion. The brand wants to drive trial, the budget sits around $50,000 for prizes, and your agency has p
- Prize Architecture: How to Structure Your Prize Pool for Maximum Impact — Most promotional budgets focus on the wrong question When brands sit down to plan a promotional campaign, the conversation almost always sta
- EOFY Promotions: Why Discounting Isn’t Your Only Option — Every May, the same thing happens. Someone in the marketing team says “we need an EOFY campaign,” and before anyone’s really thought about i
- Do You Need a Competition Permit in Australia? — A national scratch-and-win still needs a South Australian licence even when its pool sits well under the NSW threshold — because SA licenses
- Retail Media Networks in Australia: What Brands Need to Know — Australian retail media is no longer an emerging channel — it is a mainstream advertising powerhouse. With Cartology and Coles 360 collectiv
If you are working through one of these now, we’d be happy to talk it through.
