Customer Reviews

Free Prize Inside

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

The packaging is an eye-catcher. Even the faux newspaper inside is clever. The last chapter is useable for those looking to find ways to sharpen your product's or service's point of differentiation. It's a variation on the SCAMPER technique we teach in our creative marketing conferences.

I read about one book a week, and I teach sales and creative marketing to others. From my perspective, the author is a talented person, with an exceptional work history. That's why I'd like to see Seth reach deeper from a content and application perspective. His work offers little that I haven't seen presented or written about before. Also, too many attempts to create his own vocabulary leaves me confused, and often, irritated.

The book should have been one chapter long. With the main point being that soft innovations (as compared to actual product or service modifications)allow companies to move quicker and respond more inuitively with the marketplace. It's a good point, and I look forward to better works in the future.

If you're an author, get the book (with the cereal box exterior) as a lesson in promotion and packaging. If you're a marketer, first take a look at Meaningful Marketing by Doug Hall and Jeffrey Stamp. Then, get this book so you can say you've read it. While $20 shouldn't set you back financially, you may consider waiting a few months from now to see if this book shows up on Amazon's used book list at a significant discount.

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!

You only have to watch a five-year-old in the cereal aisle to understand the effectiveness of a free prize. A child will pick the healthiest fiber cereal... as long as the toy inside the box is compelling enough.

If free prizes are so effective, why do we abandon the idea when we get down to selling "serious" products? Contrary to what you may believe, the lure of the free prize doesn't diminish as people mature. If it did, no one would buy a Lexus and we would all be content with cell phones that only made telephone calls.

So where's your free prize? Whether you sell potato chips of mutual funds, a free prize works to pull customers to your brand. Don't have a free prize yet? Seth Godin will teach you the steps in creating one -- and this isn't a complex process reserved for the most elevated gurus of marketing. I'm not even in the marketing department and I put a few of the tips in the book to the test, with immediate results.

Seth guides us through championing an idea (in a way which will succeed) and using edgecraft to make your product or service remarkable in clear, example-filled chapters. The lengthy list of ways in which you can tweak your offering to make it stand out is one that I return to again and again. I have limited reading time, yet I even found myself immersed in the endnotes. There is an idea of value on every page of this book and the cereal box is arrives in will look great on your desk.

I have to agree with the nay-sayers. This book is boring, doesn't really have a point and gives only the most facile examples. At every turn I found myself saying, I know that, or, So what? Sometimes, Oh, c'mon. At other times, I think all that could be heard was the sound of snoring. The only interesting and surprising marketing effort related to this book was Godin's ability to sell it to the editor at Portfolio.

I have fond and vivid memories of badgering my mother at the grocery store to buy the box of cereal with the De-Coder Ring buried inside. Seth Godin, in his inimitable style, invites us to bring that same sense of wonder and excitement to our clients and potential customers by offering soft innovations that make our products or our services "Purple Cows," and that offer to our market the equivalent of a "Free Prize Inside."

In its content and in its packaging, "Free Prize Inside" is a logical extension of the ideas that Seth put forward in his 2003 best seller "Purple Cow." I recently presented a review of FPI at a recent staff meeting at my recruiting firm, and the response was electric. Even members of the staff who are usually slow to adopt new ideas became excited about applying the principles of "Free Prize Inside" to their individual recruiting practices. The result was that we made the decision to purchase several dozen copies of the book to offer as gifts - as a "Free Prize" - to clients and potential clients.

Remember back in the day when every cereal came with a "Free Prize Inside?" Maybe it was a toy, a game, or maybe even a bowl. You (or possibly your kids) would stand in the cereal aisle at the market, and your choice of what to buy would depend more on what the prize was than the cereal, because the cereals were pretty much all the same: wheat or corn, sugar, possibly pretty colors or a cartoon mascot. Well, in Seth Godin's fantastic follow-up to "Purple Cow" (another must-read), he contends that the business world today is much like that cereal aisle... companies are offering very similar products and services, and the differentiation comes from offering their own form of a free prize. Godin first explains what a free prize is, he then tells how to sell your great idea to your colleagues, and then he focuses on what you can do (edgecrafting- read the book to learn more about this awesome idea) to create a free prize. Nevermind that his ideas are fantastic, Godin is one of the best business writers out there. His books always offer really interesting examples of companies who have demonstrated some of the ideas he offers, and his books are so fun to read that you will find yourself laughing and sharing some of his stories with your colleagues and friends. BUY THIS BOOK!

First of all, if you can get this book inside its "cereal" box (also comes with a special Free Prize Inside besides the book), DO IT! Don't wait for these to run out, because in addition to the text of the book, these boxes and special prizes make all the theory of this book concrete. I display my box on top of a bookshelf as a reminder of what Free Prize marketing is all about.

Having said that, about the book: you know that Godin's book is going to inspire new ideas. In some ways, it is not extraordinary because, well ... marketing principles are always the same, and he's just putting new labels on them. But the new labels, perspective, and examples do inspire you to get cracking on applying the old principles in new ways for your own business.

There aren't many marketing authors that inspire the way Seth does, and if you manage just one new technique that improves sales, the book probably becomes worth hundreds or thousands of times its cost.

That just means there's twice the reason to get the book ASAP: 1) it's bound to help you make more sales; 2) the cereal box editions are limited, and if marketing is important to you, that box can be a lifelong reminder. Don't kick yourself later on when they run out.

But P.S.: if they're already gone ... just display the book prominently for yourself. It's still worth far more than the cover price.

Seth Godin has captured the essence of marketing in today's noise-filled world of advertisements and spam. His previous book explained that you needed a Purple Cow, i.e. a remarkable product, so that people would "remark" about it. Of course this sounds pretty staightforward until you get into the details of HOW to make a Purple Cow !

This is where the Free Prize comes in! Seth gives you ideas to get you started on your Purple cow as well as loads of excellent examples along the way.

I highly recommend this book and if you don't have a copy of Purple Cow, buy them both at the same time!

Forget ads. Forget TV spots. Marketing your company, your product/service, yourSELF means getting noticed and making something happen.

Seth Godin's latest, "Free Prize Inside" offers new insight and direction in the marketing of what you got, the "free prize" that sets you apart of the pack. Being a champion of ideas is critical to your efforts and your company's life. Introduce new challenges and breathe life into ideas that are sitting dormant in your mind.

This book (as have Godin's previous gems) is unique in its delivery and packaging. "How-to" will never be the same again!
Pick up a copy (or two) and find out how to be the "go-to" person in your office or on your team. Don't look for the easy answers here; like "Purple Cow" says, it's about becoming remarkable through your marketing.

Enjoy!

Seth Godin is an outstandingly creative thinker and writer of other books like Purple Cow and Permission Marketing.

His main theme is that the cost of traditional innovation such as high priced Research and Development, and expensive marketing has risen too high. The alternative he proposes is soft innovation, making an incremental change to an existing product.

Soft innovation is the Free Prize Inside. An example is Cracker Jacks and cold cereal. The free prize is a small innovation that was made to the existing product that increased its value in the marketplace. The beauty of soft innovation is that anyone in your organization can be creative enough to come up with a free prize inside of your product. And it's my opinion that this works for non-profit organizations as well where our product is programs. Small innovations can create excitement around a program that has grown dull and lifeless.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in creating excitement in their products and marketing. http://jeffreyclong.typepad.com