Is the Consumer Choice Award A Marketing Gimmick

A sloppy house-cleaning job by The Maids prompted a look at the Consumer Choice Award, a marketing-driven awards program.

CONSUMER BE AWARE | With company coming over the holidays, I did what I do every year and gave myself an early Christmas present by hiring a cleaning service to power scrub my house. In the past, I’ve used Molly Maid, but this year I waited too late to book them and wound up looking for an alternative on the Internet, which is how I discovered The Maids.

The Maids, another residential cleaning franchise operating in the U.S. and Canada, were able to come on the day and at the time I required. When I balked at giving them my credit card up front over the phone, they explained it was because they’d been burned in the past but that I didn’t need to worry because they had been around a long time and had won the Consumer Choice Award of business excellence (CCA) for six years running. Hey, Meryl Streep doesn’t have that many Oscars and everyone knows how amazing her work is.

The Maids did not do a great job on my house, so the minute they left I called the company and left a lengthy message. No one called back. So I called a second time and left another message. Again, no response, which got me wondering how a business so beloved by consumers could offer such poor customer support—and thinking that the CCA must be some kind of marketing gimmick.

How Does Consumer Choice Award Work?

The Consumer Choice Award website says its job is to market and promote businesses with superior customer service. To find these establishments, they employ a third-party market research company (in Canada this is Leger Marketing) to conduct surveys in communities around the country, asking randomly (as I understand it) selected participants to pick their favourite company across a wide variety of business types, from hairdressers and development companies, to dentists and house cleaning services. Leger compiles all the data and the companies receiving the most votes in each category are declared the winners.

The winners are then invited to participate in CCA’s promotional program, which starts at a cost of $2,000 and goes up, according to James Daouphars, communications manager. A quick search on the Internet turned up a 2009 CBC story about how CCA winners were not allowed to use the company’s trademark logo on their own marketing materials unless they paid to participate in the CCA’s “promotional program. . . to leverage the status of their award in the community.” (CLICK HERE for the story). Hmmmm.

So only those winners who pay are allowed to use the CCA logo, etc? Does this mean that there are winners out there who are never mentioned on the CCA website or in their materials because they haven’t paid to do so? It makes you wonder.

To me, the Consumer Choice Award feels like a private enterprise created to promote those businesses willing to pay for the privilege of promoting the Consumer Choice Award. Now that I know how this program operates, I’m unlikely to put faith in its winners again. —C. Rule

To find out more about the Consumer Choice Award, visit ccaward.com

M. MESSCHAERT says:

January 26, 2013 at 9:02 am

Great article! Very informative and eye-opening! Keep up this kind of investigative pieces.

Joe says:

March 8, 2014 at 7:17 pm

Yes, indeed there are ‘winners’ who are not listed because they did not pay. I know this because we ‘won’. There are ‘MUST GO TO’ functions involved, but because we were busy working at pleasing our customers, making our deadlines and couldn’t attend…no award or public acknowledgement for us. We asked to have the CCA marketing info or packages sent to us via mail or email & we’d go from there….no way CCA refused anything other than the YOU WON package. We didn’t attend and didn’t pay money for the marketing/advertising packages and that was it.
I thought we had ‘won’ based on our customers feedback in survey’s. I’m fairly sure the award is NOT based on true surveys of the general public. If it were an honest award it would have been sent to us with a ‘sorry you missed the functions’.
The other note on this whole story is a while before our congratulatory YOU WON phone call came, we received a ‘survey call’ asking about others in our business. ie: have you ever heard of business A, B, C or D? I recognized 2 as direct competition and the others as in a related business. I thought it an ‘odd survey’ seeing as I was giving some survey answers about our own business..as though we were customers. I did wonder if they didn’t hear me when I answered the phone with our business name??!! Now that I’ve researched a bit and came across your article and the CBC story I’m more convinced. I think it’s a sad way for Consumer Choice to do business. It’s not fair to businesses and equally unfair to the unsuspecting consumers.
Thanks for posting this. I hope more people see this and think twice before they trust the Consumer Choice logo. As usual word of mouth is the best advertising for any business.