More on Giving Stuff Away for Free

Following up on my previous post about the "Free" philosophy, here are a couple of other case studies:

King C. Gillette and the Safety Razor

Although ridiculous 5-blade electronic razors are commonplace these days, there was a time when men used dangerous cut-throat razors to shave. Gillette saw a need in the market and invented the disposable safety razor. He knew it was going to be a hit. However, in order to leverage on economies of scale, he needed to manufacture the blades by the millions.

Facing the problem every startup faces, he decided to give he decided to give a few thousand razors away for free. The crowds loved it, and came back to purchase. Decades later, the safety razor is still going strong, and his marketing process got it's own title: "The Razor and Blades Business Model".

How BzzAgent Monetized Word of Mouth

Although keywords like social media marketing, word of mouth and crowdsourcing are thrown about liberally these days, they were still in their infancy a decade ago. This was when David Balters came up with BzzAgent, a company that helps to organize and measure its word-of-mouth marketing. After a lot of frustrated efforts trying to get marketing teams to change their old ways and change with the times, David decided that the best thing to do was to give away the product for free, as a trial.

He approached 5 companies with the free product, but only one, the publisher Penguin, agreed. The first free project brought about a tripling of sales for Penguin. Just to make sure it wasn't just a lucky break, they requested another free project with a book that was not selling. When that succeeded as well, Penguin was sold on the idea and they've been with BzzAgent ever since.