Once upon a time, I was offered three months’ worth of home workouts for free.

The guys who run my life insurance contacted me.

“Chris!” they said. “You need to stay at home lest you contract a deadly disease called coronavirus. We don’t want you to contract coronavirus, cause if you contract coronavirus and die, we lose money!”

It was a sweet message. They were looking out for me.

“But Chris!” they said. “We still need you to exercise! Because if you stay at home to avoid contracting coronavirus but don’t exercise, you might still die anyway, and if you do, we lose money!”

They were very concerned.

So they’d weighed it all up.

And they’d decided the best solution was to offer me three months’ worth of home workouts for free.

All I needed to do was download a fitness app. With a special code, three months’ worth of home workouts were mine. For free!

And if I liked the app, I could carry on using it for £9.99 a month.

It seemed like win-win-win.

I could stay in, avoid coronavirus and exercise. A win for my insurers.

I could get a fitness app for free. A win for me.

And, if all went well, the fitness-app people could get a new customer. A win for them, too.

But it didn’t work out so smoothly.

The fitness app was new.

The workouts were glitchy. And the presentation was poor.

I abandoned the app quickly. It just wasn’t very good.

Over the next few weeks, the app improved.

They kept emailing to tell me.

But by that point, I’d started using another home workout app. It costs a bit. But I still use it today.

In my case at least, the promotion did nothing for the fitness app other than drive me towards its competition.

Here’s the moral of the story, for which Bill Bernbach gets credit.

If you want to build a strong brand, build a good product.

Because there’s no faster way to kill a bad product than advertising.