A ‘Free’ & Open Response
This morning I published a very quick post that simply asked the question ‘Would Viral Marketing Work Without Free‘. The idea of this post wasn’t to showcase my knowledge of free, it was simply to gain insight into what others thought.
As often happens with these things the response to the post came through a less conventional means (email). Unfortunately, this great piece of feedback from another kiwi blogger was not available to you the public…so in order to free it up and gain a wider perspective on it I thought I’d re-hash two of the questions that were put forward*. I’m sure my answers are far from definitive, so please chime in and give us your thoughts.
Q1: If the idea/product/service wasn’t free it couldn’t be viral (otherwise how does it spread?)
My Answer: Viral marketing was called WOM before the Internet, so viral still happened but perhaps it wasn’t as traceable (or as explosive) as it is today. So I’m not 100% sure that free is necessary for all forms viral marketing. I guess it depend on your definition of ‘viral’….
What do uthink?
Q2: With management’s motivation for free (a post by @Ophil), that’s fine – but how can you justify Free to the shareholders of a public company? (wicked question huh!)
My Answer: For shareholders it would obviously depend on the business model – for Google shareholder’s it would be easy – the more free products we make that enable people to generate content – the more advertising space we have – the more AdWords clicks we get – the more $$$ you get – easy sell!
But for a traditional business selling widgets it might be trickier – however I believe that the rationale would be much the same – give away something (a platform) that results in enhancing the consumers experience in your industry and set up a process to make sure that you are able to collect revenue (directly or indirectly) as a result of this increased user experience/involvement in your product area – it could be a hard sell to shareholders, but definitely not an unreasonable task.
Once again, what do uthink?
*Please note that questions have been paraphrased & answers have been polished.
Image from: http://www.thecommissionplan.com/