Sonic has started selling gift cards to go with the card readers recently installed in their drive up bays.  Unfortunately, every good idea in the gift card program is countered by a stupid mistake.

• A cup?

  I like the background of the card; colorful, abstract, but detailed enough to look like rings from a cup set on paper. The different colors even remind you that Sonic has a wide variety of flavorings for their drinks, and the design is tastefully finished with a logo and a URL. So why did they have to put a big picture of a styrofoam cup in there? It totally ruins what could have been a pretty classy design.

• Reloads

  The cards can be reloaded on Sonic’s website, and there is even an automatic reload subscription. I actually can’t see anything wrong with this part, but I didn’t get into the members only area.

• There’s a members only area

  For the cards, this makes some sense. If I’m going to give them my credit card number, I want a little security. Users who register their Sonic card also get some extra benefits (or so says the website). But they also put irrelevant things in their members area like screen savers and email greeting cards.

  I don’t know who started this trend, but why in the world would you want to restrict access to your advertisements? Think of all the money that is wasted because most users don’t want to register just to get a crappy branded screen saver or desktop background. Flash designers and swf to scr programs aren’t cheap. Most companies that do this claim that they want to get usage data, but if you’re giving someone an executable that they’ll run on their computer there are much easier ways to track usage.

• Bad press area

  This isn’t directly related to the card, and certainly not limited to Sonic, but there is no high-resolution picture of the Sonic Card on their website. The only “press kit” they offer is a Zip file of PDFs containing company overviews. A lot of companies are paranoid about misuse of their assets, but most “misuses” are just free advertising. Even the funny ones.

• The name

  MySonic. I thought we were done with the MyBrand thing. We get it, you know that personalization is “totally hot right now”. Stop trying to be hip. A reloadable gift card doesn’t count as personalization anyway.

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