Free Prize Inside!: The Next Big Marketing Idea by
Seth Godin, Penguin USA Portfolio
"If you were like me, you nagged your mom to buy the cereal with the free prize inside..." (more) SIPs:
soft innovations, free prizes
CAPs:
Purple Cow, American Airlines, Henry Ford, Bringing It Together, Brownie Wise (more)
Amazon.com 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
I'm a big fan of Seth Godin. His books Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Idea Virus, Purple Cow, and The Big Red Fez continue impact me on an almost daily basis. One thing I love about Seth is that he persuasively argues that in today's economy thinking on-the-edge is far safer than maintaining the status quo.
In Purple Cow, Seth argued that businesses and nonprofits need to be remarkable in order to survive. Being remarkable means that people will tell their friends about your product or service. Purple Cow was a thought provoking book but was lacking in helping readers implement the ideas. Free Prize Inside takes it the next step and shows us how to market and create remarkable changes in our organizations.
Free Prize Inside is divided into three sections: * Why You Need a Free Prize * Selling the Idea * Creating the Free Prize
A "free prize" is a soft innovation. Seth builds the case for the urgent need of people in all organizations, including nonprofits, to be championing soft innovations. Soft innovations are the "clever, insightful, useful small ideas that just about anyone in an organization can think up." A free prize may seem like a gimmick at first but it actually becomes an essential part of your product or service. We all know what our favorite cereal tastes like, but it becomes irresistible when we see we can get a free prize inside the box. To illustrate his point, Seth is selling the first printing of this book in a special-made cereal box! You can pre-order a copy at Amazon.com.
He's convinced that anyone can come up with a free prize inside. The problem comes when we share it with others. Seth says our co-workers or boss, ask three basic questions: 1. Is this idea doable? 2. Is it worth doing? 3. Are you the one able to do it successfully? If they aren't able to answer "yes" to all three questions, they won't join you, and the idea will die. The second section of the book is dedicated to specifically showing us how to keep our innovations alive by championing them and winning the support of others. After all, creating a free prize isn't important if we can't sell it to our organization.
The last section is dedicated to creating the free prizes. What would make your organization remarkable? Here Seth introduces his new concept of "edgecraft." He explains, "You're...caught in the center of a web of boring. The goal of edgecraft is to pick an edge (there are hundreds to choose from) and go all the way with it-even a little further than that if you can. Moving a little is expensive and useless. Moving a lot is actually cheaper in the long run and loaded with wonderful possibilities."
Donuts are boring but Krispy Kreme found an edge and made them sensational. Netflix did the same with movie rentals. They created a free prize by transforming the rental experience and created a very loyal customer following. The United Way found free prize when they discovered the concept of payroll deduction. Pushing that edge has helped them raised a lot of money!
Free Prize Inside is an inspiring and practical way for us to find our organization's edges and push for a free prize. It comes with extensive endnotes that cite Seth's sources, expand on points, and point you to great information on the web. I particularly appreciate Seth's constant attention to the nonprofit sector throughout the book. I highly recommend getting a copy. And, if you order it before it's published in May, you can still get it in a cereal box!
Godin's previous book, Purple Cow, presents examples of how to stand out from the herd. Free Prize Inside shows how to make that happen. It answers questions of "How do you create a Purple Cow?" "How do you make something sell itself?"
When we buy cereal, especially kiddie cereal, what's the best part? The free prizes inside, of course! That's the thinking behind the book.
Free prizes aren't just the stuff you find in cereal or Cracker Jack. Does your credit card offer free airline miles or money towards the next car you buy? That counts. What about an online store offering free shipping? What I remember the most about some tradeshows and expos are the drawings for free prizes, the goodies I received, and the shirts I still have.
This book has impeccable timing. As an editor of a newsletter, I have been struggling to find ideas to pep it up and draw in more subscribers since new subscriptions have slowed down. I cheat and go straight to page 131, the start of the list of "Edges" and look for a spark of creativity to create an "Edgecraft" (book's buzzword) to find a free prize. The goal is to find something to reel people in, to give them something they want like the previously mentioned examples.
I learn from examples and Godin lists plenty of them using Edgecraft in action. He is not saying you have to invent something new to make something happen. It's about taking what you already have going and how to make your product, service, head, blog, whatever worth talking about and watching the results.
With three kids, a spouse, two jobs, a house, and volunteer work, finding time to read a book is a challenge. Even if I weren't a book reviewer, getting through this book would be a breeze because (a) it's 183 pages (the rest are detailed endnotes with references and explanations), (b) it highlights plenty of key points for easy scanning, and (c) each section or idea is short. Getting bite-sized pieces of information is enough to get going with the concepts gleaned from the book and make something happen.
If your organization needs to jump-start its creative processes, this accessible book may be helpful. It's broad enough to apply to all industries and has enough examples to provoke some serious thinking. Yet, Seth Godin, also the author of other zippy marketing books, sometimes gets carried away with his own evangelism and coinages (e.g., "edgecraft" for finding innovative product additions at the fringes of your current offerings). Still, Godin's thesis that small improvements and "soft" innovations can reap big benefits rings true, as his many examples make clear. His discussion about why ideas need champions, and how to be one, is also powerful. So if you want your marketing or product development staffers to juice up their creativity, we say this light little book might inspire them to think differently.
This book is an extension of purple cow, perhaps the bits he failed to add. Plain and simple it is anecdotal at best with no facts to back up his assertions and at worst it is simply another way of financing his vacations to Europe.
Seth's recent books are rapidly shrinking in size with less and less to say, if you are a Seth Fan (I used to be until he started churning out half-baked books without substance) pick up a second hand copy. Seth talks about holding off marketing slight improvements and waiting until a substantial customer driven Free prize emerges. Well Seth take some of your own medicine and bring us a new book with pages, content and a few facts to back up your ideas.
Awesome book. Seth's "BIG FRONT FOUR" (my name for four key excerpts that knocked me for a loop)...
"Focus on the unsatisfied."
"Make An Invisible Service Visible."
"The free prize transcends the utility of the original idea."
"When you identify what's broken among your competitors,
you've found a free prize."
... caused us to find our product's "Secret Prize."
We implemented a program within 5 days that has so far caused sales to jump by 50%. Tremendous feedback from inbound e-mail corroborates that we're on the right track, as does the fact that existing customers identify strongly with this "core" messaging.
I've read all of Seth Godin's books. This one is his best.
Ken Evoy
President, SiteSell.com
htttp://www.sitesell.com/
Seth Godin has another hit with his latest, Free Prize Inside. As the old adage goes, the best things in life are free. Godin emphasizes that the common consumer is more influenced by the promise of something free rather than an advertisement that interrupts our time and that we did not really want to see anyway. As a consumer, I think this is extremely accurate. I am always enticed by the thought of a free gift, and I don't think that an ad has ever impacted me as much regarding my desire to buy an item or try a new restaurant. His example of amazon.com is a great one. Since amazon.com started offering free shipping, their sales have increased by 37%. I know from personal experience, that free shipping is always a great way to get me to purchase anything from an online site. Godin also goes through many ways of selling the idea of the free prize and deciding what that free prize should be. This is a great book for any entrepeneur or any existing company, for it explains how to reel in the consumer and spend the money allotted for marketing in an efficient and effective way. Godin really knows the hearts and minds of the American consumer, and this book is a great read for anyone interested in making a buck.
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Highly Recommended!, July 21, 2005
Ooh Dear Seth - what happened?, June 1, 2005