Bizmarketer’s Five Rules for Free Stuff

It’s a sure sign of Spring when my first golf apparel catalogue arrives in the mail. Breathless explanations of the latest trends in shirts, jackets, towels, and those little divot tools just get me so excited. After a busy trade show season, you’d think the Cupboard O’ Crap would be bare to the walls. But you would be wrong! The Cupboard O’ Crap is full of stress balls, XXXL T-shirts, water bottles, pens and folding calculators from long-forgotten product launches.  And there are all those clever LED clocks and crunched up towels in the shape of New Mexico. Those are sure swell.

In the B2C world, stuff like this is easy to get rid of. Most consumers will trade a minor organ and one of their kids for a t-shirt, cap or air freshener, as long as it’s free or confers some kind of exclusive feeling, however briefly.

In B2B, the initial thrill of a free thing is often replaced by deep suspicion (this is nice; what do you want?), dread (even the kids won’t want this) and, on occasion, a genuine delight at something that is new and lovely and reinforces a larger message. This last is what we are after, but it’s also the standard that manages to elude the trinket industry. So here are my five rules for making sure the free stuff delivers some value:

1. Make it relevant: You may think singing vegetable peelers are amusing, and that a picnic basket evokes a gentler time, and you may be right, but is that what you want your prospective customers to think about? Or do you want them to see the item in question in a relevant context and remember that your company does something necessary to their success?
2. Make it useful: Your customer or prospect thinks mostly about work when he or she is at work. They think mostly about home stuff when they are not at work. A corkscrew is a lovely thing if you want to be fondly remembered while someone is miles away from their desk and your product.  The light-up yo-yo will give someone’s nine-year-old hours of pleasure, but you don’t sell to nine-year-olds. If you want to be top-of-mind during the work day, you should consider something that can be used or at least looked at in that context.  It gets tougher when you consider that most professionals have more than enough pens, mugs, calculators and desk clocks. Just a note: if your customers plan to use the corkscrew at 10am in the office, you have a much different issue.
3. Line it up with your message and/or your value proposition: I have a riding crop on my office wall. I’m not a jockey and don’t beat my co-workers. The little cardboard thingy attached to it says: “Whip your data into shape”. On the back is the URL for Captell Developments, the company that sent this to me. This is on-message. I have a squishy ball that looks a bit like our planet with the logo and URL for a printing company. This is not on- message. Figure out what you want to say about your company or product and then find a LOGICAL free thing that clearly supports that message in a tactile and visual way. If you have to explain it, you have failed.
4. If you can’t be engaging, at least be essential: The ideal free thing is relevant, useful (at work) and aligned with your message. But that can describe a 59-cent pen. What you want to aim for is something that is all these things and also, on some level, engaging for the user. It can be fun to handle (think Slinky) or beautiful or kind of fun (think mini putter) or just plain unusual (riding crop). The more your customers and prospects pick up your free thing, handle it, show it to their co-workers and display it on their desk as evidence of their esteemed place in your hearts (or balance sheet), the more you get to reinforce your value proposition. If engaging isn’t in the budget or on-message, then go for essential. Things that get used everyday or for which there are no good substitutes are great. Try retractable badge holders or USB sticks if you just can’t think of anything else.
5. Make them want to do business with you: Okay, that’s a tall order for a piece of lucite, but if you’re going to drop money on this stuff, it should, at the very least, make a nice impression.  Before you go off and fill a room full of junk you’ll end up throwing out or, worse, that your customers and prospects give to their kids, consider the overall impact. Do you need to give away a free thing? Do you need to give one to everyone or can you do better by giving away one awesome thing to a lucky prospect? Will it still be on your customer’s desk in three months? Six months? Three years? If your logo fell off, would the recipient remember who gave it to them? Does it send a positive, professional message?

What’s your favourite free thing? What was memorably awful?

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams,
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter