Marketing Matters

Thanks to Chris Anderson, there’s a lot of talk lately about the true value of “free”.  Most people like the idea of “free” of course, but “free” is like most poisons – it’s ok in small doses. You can’t get carried away with free, though, because not only does it have a negative impact on the bottom line, but it’s messy, too.

As much as people like free, they don’t like messy. Messy things make it hard for us to feel at ease. There’s no peace in a mess. MySpace is pretty messy compared with Facebook, which is why MySpace is on the wane and Facebook is growing. Sure, you don’t have the ability to personalize your page, but the conversations are nice and tidy and can be followed more easily. Twitter is entirely messy – it’s hard to cut through the chatter sometimes to find the things you really want to know, so I fully expect to find it’s been replaced by something else in another year or so.

Free things are messy in the same way that Twitter is messy – there’s a certain amount of chaos in them and you need to feel at home with chaos to be able to make the most of it. The other day, some friends and I went to a restaurant’s anniversary celebration which featured free food. We got there about 5 minutes after the doors opened and found the line reached down the block. The line moved painfully slowly and once you got your food, there was no place to sit because everyone in town, it seemed, showed up for the free food. The restaurant hadn’t been prepared for the consequences of “free”. The food was delicious, but if you weren’t able to embrace the chaos, it was not a good place to be.

So before you leap on the free bandwagon, make sure you’re prepared to ride the wave of chaos it creates. It’s not for everyone. It’s messy.

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