Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

According to marketing maven and Purple Cow author Seth Godin, the "Television Industrial Complex"--and its nasty habit of interrupting people with advertisements for things they don't want--is dead. Innovation is cheaper than advertising, advises Godin who defines the "free prize" with diverse examples including swatch watches, frequent flyer miles, dog bakeries, Tupperware parties and portable shredding trucks. He explains "Design matters, style matters, extras matter."

The largest portion of the book is devoted to how to sell an idea to your organization. His specific tactics range from irreverent, (let them pee on your ideas) to practical (how to build a prototype). One standout chapter explains how brainstorming can become boring. His alternative, "edgecraft," involves divergent thinking to add something remarkable to your product. His long grocery list of edges (safety, equality, invisibility, and hours of operation) suggest a genuine marketing manifesto. The ideas are bold and insightful, but can suffer from being presented in less than logical order. The book is also diminished by Godin's self-marketing, from using terminology in his previous books to naming key ideas after himself. These advertisements are unnecessary. This nervy little volume is bound to mother many inventions. --Barbara Mackoff

Seth Godin may be the best intuitive marketer alive today. (Randall Rothenberg)

Purple Cow was the #1 bestselling marketing book on Amazon in 2003. Now in Free Prize Inside, Seth Godin is back with practical advice on how to put Purple Cow thinking to work inside your organization (big or small, profit or non) to MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN. The next big marketing idea is a proven strategy for making your products or services so remarkable that they practically sell themselves.

Purple Cow taught marketers the value of standing out from the herd, which is how companies like Krispy Kreme and JetBlue made it big. But it left readers hungry for more: How do you actually think up new Purple Cows? And how do you get them adopted by risk-averse Brown Cow companies?

Free Prize Inside delivers those answers and much more. It’s a fun guide to doing innovative marketing that really works when the traditional approaches have all stopped working. Thirty years ago, the best way to sell something was to advertise it on television. But today’s consumers are cynical, and your product or service had better be more than just hype and clever advertising. Even better, it ought to come with a market-changing innovation—a free prize inside.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to create something cool that virtually sells itself. Think of simple but powerful innovations like the Tupperware party, Flintstones vitamins, G.I. Joe (a doll just for boys), Lucille Roberts (a gym just for women), and frequent flier miles. Free Prize Inside will teach you how to create those kinds of blockbusters at your own company without a bunch of MBA-brainwashed marketers. You don’t have to be a genius—you just need curiosity, initiative, and a strategy for overcoming resistance when you champion your idea.

We’re all marketers now, no matter what our job titles. With Godin’s help, we can find the free prize that will transform our companies.

Seth Godin's most recent book, Purple Cow, hit The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and New York Times bestseller lists, with more than 90,000 copies in print. Free Prize Inside follows up some of the concepts in this book, answering questions readers were left with like: How do you actually think up new Purple Cows?; and how do you get them adopted by risk-averse Brown Cow companies? It gives examples of market-changing innovations - the free prizes that worked like G.I Joe (a doll just for boys) and frequent flier miles - and teaches how to re-create these blockbuster ideas.

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, a sought-after lecturer, a monthly columnist for Fast Company, and an all-around business gadfly. He’s the bestselling author of Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Big Red Fez, Survival Is Not Enough, and Purple Cow.

Section 1

Why You Need a Free Prize

Can I Get It, Mom?
If you were like me, you nagged your mom to buy the cereal with the free prize inside. You bought Cracker Jacks to get the goofy little prize, too. We may have known that the cereal without a prize was just as good, but of course, it wasn’t just as good. It didn’t have a prize.

In those days, cereal makers had it easy. They could offer a free prize and create amazing advertising as well. They could charge a significant premium over the generic brands if they had a talking tiger or a toucan or a Cap’n riding a boat through a sea of milk.

Today, of course, that’s no longer true. Cereal isn’t the cash machine it used to be, there are too many brands, not enough shelf space and a newly cost-sensitive consumer that isn’t fooled by TV advertising.

All we’ve got left is the prize. The only way to stand out and command noncommodity pricing is to innovate. You can innovate with a licensed character or a cool shape or high- protein ingredients. You can innovate with packaging or pricing or even—yes, it’s true— by putting a cool prize in the box.

It’s not only cereal. More than a decade ago, when Lincoln-Mercury started putting Bose stereos in their high-end cars, they were astonished to discover that more than half the buyers opted to add the $8,000 stereo to their $12,000 cars. The amazing thing is that almost none of these people had a stereo even remotely that expensive in their living rooms at home. They thought they were going out to buy a car, but they were entranced by something else—the innovation, the free prize. They were buying a stereo with wheels.

Innovation Is Actually
Cheaper Than Advertising
It didn’t used to be true, but in a world of Purple Cows, when the marketing is built into the product, creating products that are innovative is actually cheaper than advertising average products.

So, once your company realizes (and is sold on) that insight, then it will invest the money it would have spent on advertising to create cool products instead. That innovation is free. In fact, it’s a profit center.

Big companies don’t blink before spending $100 million on the marketing for a product launch. Small companies spend plenty on billboards or local advertising. But since that isn’t working, they’d be better off spending half that amount and making something really special instead.

By the time you finish this book, you’ll discover that the future belongs to companies, organizations and people who are remarkable, not boring.

Introducing the Godin Curve
The right half of the curve demonstrates that as you invest in media, you need to have a higher and higher expected return to break even. That makes sense. If you run a ton of Super Bowl ads or spend a lot of time and money to get on Oprah, that’s expensive. It’s a risk. You need a big payoff to make it worth it.

I’m not making a controversial assertion here. The simple fact is that the more you spend, the more sales you need to justify that spending (and the risk and overhead that goes with it).

The left part of the curve shows that the same is true for technology. If you spend a fortune building a gizmo, you need to have a very high expected return in order to break even on your investment and have enough left over to have the risk of the investment be worth it.

When Iridium invested $3 billion to launch sixty-six satellites in permanent orbit around the Earth, they were making a very big bet. In order to make a bet like that pay off, the return has to be astronomical.

The Godin curve combines the two parts, then adds a dotted line. The dotted line shows how much revenue you can expect (historically) from big investments in media or technology. Yes, you generate more revenue when you get a big ad campaign right or when you launch a high-tech success. Surprisingly, though, the increase in revenue isn’t commensurate with the increase in risk. You can spend more and more, but you can’t earn more and more.

Big technology and media projects rarely generate the huge returns necessary to make them worth the effort. Sometimes they fail altogether. Iridium went bankrupt. So did Pets.com. Even when they do work, they often generate relatively little more revenue than cheaper campaigns or cheaper technology do.

The final version of the curve (named after Antoine Godin, the great explorer) subtracts the costs of development and media from the project’s revenue and shows your likely profit (the dotted line). The spot between the two curves is the free-prize zone, the place where a different kind of innovation lives, the place where you can live and work and profit.

Let me make it really clear:

You can’t afford difficult and risky technological innovation, because the return you’ll receive is unlikely to justify the investment.

You can’t afford to do huge media and PR buys because the return you’ll receive is unlikely to justify the investment.

But you can profit all day long by leveraging insight and creativity to come up with cheap innovations that have a significant return. The center of the curve is all yours.

Huge returns go to organizations that create remarkable innovations, regardless of their cost or provenance.

How Can This Be?
This is counterintuitive. It implies that the things that “smart” (big) companies have been spending the most on is the stuff that doesn’t really matter.

Exactly.

Each incremental dollar on big ad spending doesn’t contribute appropriate incremental profit in return.

Each incremental dollar spent on big R&D and technology investment doesn’t contribute appropriate incremental profit in return.

The two pillars have crumbled. Differentiating yourself with patents or ads is too hard. Something else is at work. There’s a new way of winning, and it’s happening because of a confluence of reinforcing events.

1. Consumers (at home or at work) have always wanted more than they say they want. We proclaim ourselves to be rational, cost-conscious, Consumer Reports–reading smart people. In fact, we are happy to pay extra for whitewall tires, beautiful leather nappiness on our shoes, a sophisticated showroom in which to shop and even stamps we don’t have to lick. We don’t insist on the biggest ads or the latest technology. We want cool stuff.

Design matters. Style matters. Extras matter. We want the free prize, sometimes more than we want the thing itself.

J. D. Power announced in 2003 that Land Rover was near the bottom of their customer service index ranking, right near Kia, Isuzu and Daewoo. This doesn’t seem to have any effect on their sales, which are at record levels. Apparently, people are buying Land Rovers at a huge premium over most any other car, even though the main thing a car is supposed to do—run when you want it to run—isn’t one of its strong points. It’s the design and the look and the legend and brochure and the dealership, and the look in your neighbor’s eye when you drive it home. Obviously, people are buying the car for some reason that does not have much to do with going from one place to another.

2. We now live in a world where the path from great idea to the consumer is shorter than ever. It used to take years to build a plant, set up distribution, do the advertising and get the product into the hands of the user. The rules have changed. Within four hours of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s surprise announcement about his gubernatorial bid, someone was selling T-shirts with his image online. This means that there’s less reason to build some giant campaign for the future—the competition is building something for right now.

3. The tools that are available to creators are so much better than they used to be. We can prototype machines on our desktop, mock up Web sites on our desktop, and even model behaviors on our desktop. The bar for truly revolutionary...