Is Lots of Free Stuff a Good Idea?8/16/2009
I’ve just finished the new book by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. His previous bestseller, The Long Tail, showed how the online marketplace creates niche markets, helping businesses connect more accurately and successfully with their customers. My supervisor at work required all staff to read an article summarizing the book. So when I saw Anderson’s latest, I decided to take a closer look. The title is Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which argues that businesses can profit more from giving away their goods and services than from charging for them. Huh? This idea is not new; supermarkets have persuaded customers to spend more by offering "buy one, get one free" promotions for decades. Consider downloads. Digital content is nearly free to produce, so why not give it away? For example, give away part of a book as a download in order to entice the customer to pay for the whole thing. Anderson chose to offer a free download of the entire book while selling the hard copy for full price. While this offer was available, the e-book was downloaded 170,000 times while the hard copy became a New York Times bestseller. Now the free download is only an excerpt. A business can give away a service--such as Amazon’s free shipping for orders over $25--and charge for the product, or give away the product--such as a gift for opening a bank account--and charge for the service. Other kinds of Free have one customer group subsidizing another, such as giving women free admission to bars while charging men, or giving away credit cards without a fee while charging merchants a transaction fee. Anderson pulls together fifty currently existing Free business models at the end of the book, and responds to fourteen commonly heard objections to Free. What are practical peacemakers to make of this? We want to be wary of enticements to buy more than we need in actual products, because the resources consumed in their manufacture and transportation deplete our planet. But as Anderson points out, the environmental concern is much less important regarding services or virtual products that are free, so is there a problem with giving them away? I see it as a question of mental pollution, of complexity and priorities. Constantly being enticed with special promotions, offers that must be accepted now to be valid, sales on this if we buy that, more downloads to watch or listen to, all consume our time and money and make our lives busier and less mindful. It encourages us to spend more of our time online instead of getting exercise, interacting with real people, or pausing to notice a flower in bloom. It occupies us with acquiring more stuff and getting deals, and diverts our attention away from small, local businesses that better deserve our dollars than the online giants because they support the economic health of our communities. Surprisingly, Anderson doesn’t mention the changes that will overtake marketing, the availability of goods, and purchasing power as the effects of peak oil begin to be felt. As that happens in the next few years, marketing will change dramatically. I’m already tired of so many promotions and deals, and the time it takes to evaluate them in order to make intelligent buying choices. It is my hope that a positive aspect of peak oil will be a return to the practice of evaluating our purchases based on what we need and will actually use, what will strengthen our local economies, and what is well-made and will last. Then instead of creating or accepting the next Free scheme for another download or gift, we can spend that time cooking a homemade meal, going out for a walk or a game of tennis, playing with a child, or reading a poem.
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