Being a subscriber to a few News24 email subscriptions, I get the joy of entering their many competitions (I subscribe to their emailers purely because I want to enter their competitions, not to actually read the content). Today, I found out about the News24 online shop. Okay, well done, you are diversifying. Not well done, is offering prizes for a competitor’s shop, Kalahari.com (formally Kalahari.net), well, those where the very first thoughts in my head.

Wheels 24 Emailer

I thought about this, and realised that there is a strategic tie in between Kalahari.com and News24 (they both part of the Naspers group), but, is that a link that most people make? My initial thought was “Why are you giving me a prize to shop somewhere else?”, and I wonder how many other people thought this.

This leaves me to wonder which strategy is being followed

1. Leverage off the Kalahari.com brand in order to promote News24’s online shopping offering
2. Leverage off the News24 brand to try and bolster usage of Kalahari.com by offering vouchers in the hope that people will try the newly revamped Kalahari.com website
3. There is no strategy and the 2 sites are being run by the same team, and someone said “Hey, we have a bunch of Kalahari.com vouchers that we have budgeted to use and we need to do so before the end of the year!”

Then it hit me when I took the time to actually look at the page, it’s just a portal into an offering from Kalahari.com, not an offering by News24!

Damn you Naspers for wasting valuable space in my brain, I could have been doing other things, like solving world hunger (okay, not likely), and for reminding me of the age old saying “The more you learn, the less you know”, and that sometimes the simplest answer is the right one!