Let’s begin with a warning: This post is completely speculative. Also, we’re not being sponsored by lelong.com.my for this post or website.
While browsing on lelong.com.my, I stumbled upon their 20th anniversary competition. The grand prize was the upcoming Proton X70. A few things suddenly came together in my head:
1) Competitions like these usually have fixed internal budgets
2) Competitions like these usually announce how much the prizes are worth
3) We don’t know what the new Proton X70 costs
So, we decided to try and estimate what the marketing department of Lelong put aside for the car.
Thankfully, the competition disclosed almost everything we needed:
1) The prizes were worth “up to RM200,000”
2) The list of prizes
Some prizes were easy to put a price to. The RM10,000 holiday voucher probably costs RM10,000. The iPhone X 64GB went for RM4,200 officially.
For most of the other items, we used Lelong’s search function to find a rough estimate of how much sellers listed them for. As a general guide, we took the prices from bigger, local sellers. In any case, most of the prizes were under RM1000, so a little inaccuracy was perfectly fine.
It’s also worth noting that there were multiples of some of the cheaper prizes. 50 consolation prizes worth RM20, for example, added up to RM1000.
We put all of these numbers into an Excel sheet. We of course want to know what the Grand Prize, the Proton SUV, is worth. So I inserted the formula for the estimated price as ‘=200000-SUM(E4:E23)’
The answer?
RM167,845
How very… spicy. So, does Lelong magically know how much the X70 costs? Nah, we doubt it.
We have to consider a couple of things:
1) Prizes worth “up to RM200,000” could mean they’re allocating up to RM167,845 for the grand prize IN CASE OF THE WORST CASE SCENARIO, a full spec X70 costs as much as a full spec CR-V in its fully-imported form
2) Sometimes, to make contests feel a lot bigger than they are, the marketing department will take some liberties and round up to a nice big figure. They could probably only be spending RM170,000 on all the prizes, but just make it sound better by saying “up to RM200,000”
By the way, that contest is still running. It’s super easy to enter. If you’re from lelong.com.my and want to thank me for the free press, I do need a few computer parts in my life. Hit me up in the comments for my house address.
