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100 Great
Marketing Ideas
Jim Blythe
ISBN: 978-0-462-09942-2
IDEA 1: Give the product
away
Giving the product away might seem crazy – but in some cases
it
is the only way to establish it in a new market. When a product
is revolutionary, few people want to be the fi rst to try it, so
asking
them for money up front often simply creates a barrier. In some
cases, this is just something we have to live with, but if owning
the
product means that the customer will have to buy repeatedly, giving
away something that creates a dependency is good business.
There are many examples in practice of products that are sold cheap,
with the company making its money on the peripherals. Spare parts
for cars are an example – the cars are sold relatively
cheaply, but
genuine spares are expensive, because that is how the manufacturer
makes money. There is no reason at all to be wedded to the idea
that every product that leaves the factory gates has to have a price
tag on it, and many companies have succeeded admirably by giving
products away.
The idea
When King C. Gillette invented the safety razor he
was working as
a salesperson for a bottle-cap manufacturer. He conceived
the idea
for a disposable razor when his cut-throat razor got
too old to be
resharpened: he fairly easily developed a way of making
the blades
and the razors to hold them (the fi rst blades were
made from clock
springs) but economies of scale meant that the blades
could only
be profi table if he could manufacture them in their
millions. He
needed a quick way of getting men to switch over from
cut-throat to
disposable razors, so he decided to give the product away.
Gillette gave away thousands of razors, complete with blades,
knowing that few men would go back to using a cut-throat razor
once they had experienced the safety razor. Within a few days they
would need to buy new blades, so Gillette had created an instant
market, limited only by his capacity to give away more razors.
In time, once the product was established in the market and the
fi rst users (the innovators) had started telling their friends
about the
product, Gillette was able to start charging for the razors themselves.
However, the razors were always sold at close to, or even below,
the
manufacturing cost – the company makes its money on selling the
blades, which cost almost nothing to produce and which can be sold
for a premium price.
In time, other shaving systems
came along (plastic disposables, for
example) that superseded Gillette’s idea, but the basic marketing
idea remains and is still used to this day. In practice
•
Identify products that carry a long-term commitment to buying
peripherals, spares, or other consumables.
•
Decide your target market – there is no point giving out freebies
to all and sundry if they aren’t going to follow through
and buy
your product later.
•
Make sure you have good intellectual property rights (patents,
etc.) so that nobody can enter the market with knock-off
consumables that work with your giveaway product.
The 99 other great
sales ideas featured in this book:
2. Make it fun
3. Get decision-makers together
4. Tease your customers
5. The “real money” mailing
6. Withdraw the product
7. Find the key account
8. Add some value
9. Do something different
10. Respect your consumer
11. Play a game
12.Bring a friend
13. Use promotional gifts that really promote
14. Do not bind the mouths of the kine
15. Empowering staff
16. Speak the customer’s language
17. Build your corporate culture
18. Have a startling brand
19. Make the product easy to demonstrate
20. Throw a party
21. Follow up on customers later
22. Lost customers are not always lost
23. Bait the hook
24. Hold on to those brochures
25. Show people the competition
26. Take your partners
27. Making exhibitions work
28. Set the price, even on things you are giving away
29. Let them shout!
30. Turn a disadvantage to an advantage
31. Develop an icon
32. Educate your customers
33. Tap into country-of-origin effect
34. Charge what the service is worth
35. Be consistent
36. Love your customers, love what they love
37. Make it easy for people to pay
38. Credit where credit’s due
39. Don’t compete
40. Keep them waiting
41. Form a club
42. Get the layout right
43. Avoid annoying the customers
44. Work with the negative aspects of your product
45. Put yourself on a networking site
46. Discourage the undesirables
47. Watch how people actually use your products
48. Form a panel
49. Get somebody else to pay for what you give your
customers for free
50. Make people behave
51. Give people something that helps you to communicate
your brand to them
52. Help your allies to help you
53. Keep your eggs in one basket
54. Whet the customer’s appetite
55. Be startling in ways that involve your customer
56. If you’re on the web, you’re global
57. Look beyond the obvious
58. Find the USP
59. Reposition into a better market
60.Use the packaging
61. Influence the influencers
62. Research your customers
63. Involve your customers
64. Integrate your database
65. Tap into the social network
66. Flog it on eBay
67. Communicate in a relevant way
68. Develop your brand personality by linking it to a real
personality
69. Know your customer’s motivations
70. Identify your competitors—and learn from them
71. Pick the segments nobody else wants
72. Pick a card
73. Trust your customers to handle their own complaints
74. Find the lost tribe
75. Find the right partners
76. Tailor your products
77. Integrate communications
78. Share the wealth
79. Think small
80. Be the expert
81. Ads on cars
82. Go to the source of customers
83. Make your customers laugh
84. Focus on the key issue for your customer
85. Vary the ambience
86. Grab them early
87. Be child-friendly
88. Understand how you are judged
89. Introduce a third alternative
90. Place your product
91. Specialize to charge a premium
92. Develop a separate brand for each market
93. Use opinion leaders
94. Link to a cause
95. Set a sprat to catch a mackerel
96. Consider the culture
97. Build a new distribution channel
98. Use a weblog
99. Make buying easy
100. Make your product easier to use than everybody else’s
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