The Great Free Adventure

My Dad thinks its humourous to have as part of his email signature the statement: "Shewmaker saying: Humans are the craziest people on earth."

When it comes to marketing, humans are definitely strange. Recently, Seth Godin decided to give away some of his materials in order to improve his exposure. Today, Seth posted an email on his blog with the accompanying headline "Is "free" all it's cracked up to be?"

The email is from Acland Brierty who writes concerning an experiment in which Acland's company started giving away their products expecting to make the money back through online advertising. Strangely, the download rate for the product did not increase significantly. Eventually, they went back to charging and both sales and revenues increased.

Have you seen the TV ad for Leptoprin? It features a woman pacing back and forth and back and forth, while she says things like, "When is a diet pill worth 153 dollars?" The commercial NEVER attempts to give any scientific evidence for the quality of the pill, but instead uses the price point, combined with anecdotes to sell the product. I strongly doubt that the pill is worth 15.3 dollars, but apparently pushing the pricepoint is also pushing the sales.

The same thing has historically been true in the sale of Newspapers. Although there is money to be made by the free newspapers which carry a lot of advertising, you may notice that the newspapers with the greatest circulation are those which charge a hefty subscription fee.

For some reason, at least in the USA, if something is free, it is expected to be worthless and if a pill is sold at $153 a lot of Americans assume that it is worth $153.

So, I suppose my Dad is right. Humans are the craziest people on Earth. :-)