Make it Free, or Don’t Make It

In recent weeks we’ve posted a number of articles in this blog relating to the heated debate going on right now about “free”.

Free happens to be one of my favorite subjects – you’ll understand why, and how it’s shaping our own thinking if you read It Started in the Burlington Coat Factory.

Anybody thinking of starting an Internet business might also get some valuable insight into what we’ve discovered in our attempts to make it work at:

• Funding an Internet Start Up
• Winning in the Many to Many Free Market
• Making Money in the Information Age
• Chris Anderson on Free, the Future of Radical Price

Now there’s some real world evidence of what the “free” thinkers have been suggesting.

Guy Kawasaki just posted on Openforum an article about a conference called Revenue Bootcamp. The conference opened with a panel of young people ranging from high school students to recent college graduates plus an expert in youth marketing from YPulse discussing how they use the Internet—and what they are, will, or might pay for.

Here’s a list of the main points, reproduced from Guy’s article,  to come out of the discussion:

1. They hardly pay for anything. One panelist doesn’t even pay for Internet service but grabs it from an unsuspecting neighbor.
2. They are not loyal to Facebook in the sense that if Facebook started charging, they would just use another service.
3. The only service that the boys are willing to pay for is Xbox Live; this means that all companies have to do is create another Halo. How hard could that be?
4. They are remarkably enamored with Gmail and the services that comes with it. Can it be that email is the killer app of social media?
5. They seldom intentionally click on any kind of advertising, and they never buy anything because of the advertising.
6. They feel little obligation or guilt about getting everything for free, so if someone tells that unless they start paying, a company/service/site will go away, it’s not going to work.

Here’s the full video

Tweet
for Sales Management Insight, Strategies, Tactics, Processes and Tools
Check out our Tutorials at the top of this page and for Successful Sales Management implement these ideas with Front Office Box.

Tagged as: Business, Gmail, Guy Kawasaki, Marketing