Jeep Australia touched base with B&T and took the time to debunk those conspiracies swirling around social media about The World’s Most Remote Dealership campaign.

Never before could we rally a bloc of believers until Captain Social overpowered the interwebs.

Within one minute, The World’s Most Remote Dealership centre received 30,000 phone calls and over 60,000 server requests for the phone number and hundreds of disgruntled users took to Facebook to spit out conspiracies that explained why:

a) They didn’t receive the phone number

b) They couldn’t get through to the call centre or

c) They missed the boat altogether because the promotion was a “set up”

Bummer.

Mark McCraith, director of marketing, Fiat Chrysler Group insisted the 10 Jeep owners from Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria won “fair and square.”

For the marginal percentage of users that submitted complaints, McCraith explains the individual time settings on a users’ phone may have been why some participants didn’t get through to the call centre and the varying speed of access from different telecommunication providers may have also caused those hundreds of participants to have had a negative user experience.

“We shut down the phone number once the 10 successful callers were identified,” says McCraith, which explains why some users didn’t even receive a phone number as they were tracking their registration on the Jeep App.

“With only 10 Jeeps available at $10K drive away, it was inevitable that we would have some disappointed fans,” explains McCraith.

The Facebook group, If you think the JEEP give away was a scam has swelled to almost 300 members with a number of them threatening to take their complaints to the ACCC.

An ACCC spokesperson made the following statement:

• The ACCC is aware of consumer concerns relating to the Jeep ‘Remote Dealership’ promotion.
• Generally speaking, the Australian Consumer Law prohibits businesses from making false, misleading or deceptive representations and concerns may arise where consumers are misled into error from representations used as part of the promotion of products or services.
• Whether the activities of a business raise concerns under these provisions depends on the circumstances of each case.
• In making any assessment as to what action it would take, the ACCC would have regard to the elements set out in its Compliance and Enforcement Policy.

Technically speaking, Jeep Australia insists they took all of the necessary precautions to ensure the App could handle the capacity of users who registered for the promotion.

I challenge many other companies to take 30,000 calls in a minute

Declares McCraith.

http://youtu.be/PMAmJddriNw