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Navan Chamber would like to thank Joseph Daly and the team at Fidentia-Norwalk for providing these book reviews. Fidentia-Norwalk can be contacted via their website, www.fidentia-norwalk.ie
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Book
Title: Free Prize Inside
Author: Seth Godin
Publisher: Penguin Books, 2005
Review Date: 11/14/2006
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About
the Book:
Purple Cow taught marketers the value of standing out from the herd, which is how companies like Krispy Kreme and JetBlue made it big. But it left readers hungry for more: How do you actually think up new Purple Cows? And how do you get them adopted by risk-averse Brown Cow companies?
Free Prize Inside delivers those answers and much more. It is a fun guide to doing innovative marketing that really works when the traditional approaches have all stopped working. Thirty years ago, the best way to sell something was to advertise it on television. But today is consumers are cynical, and your product or service had better be more than just hype and clever advertising. Even better, it ought to come with a market-changing innovation—a free prize inside.
You do not have to spend a fortune to create something cool that virtually sells itself. Think of simple but powerful innovations like the Tupperware party, Flintstones vitamins, G.I. Joe (a doll just for boys), Lucille Roberts (a gym just for women), and frequent flier miles. Free Prize Inside will teach you how to create those kinds of blockbusters at your own company without a bunch of MBA-brainwashed marketers. You do not have to be a genius—you just need curiosity, initiative, and a strategy for overcoming resistance when you champion your idea.
Review:
“Godin and his colleagues are working to persuade some of the most powerful companies in the world to reinvent how they relate to their customers. His argument is as stark as it is radical: Advertising just does not work as well as it used to-in part because there is so much of it, in part because people have learned to ignore it, in part because the rise of the Net means that companies can go beyond it." William C. Taylor, Founding Editor, Fast Company
About the Authors:
Seth Godin, VP Direct Marketing, Yahoo! Inc., is responsible for Yahoos direct marketing, permission marketing and Internet promotions. He is recognized as the pioneer of Permission Marketing and is a sought-after speaker on the conference circuit. Godin holds an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School and he is the author and co-author of a number of business books, including E-Marketing, The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook, part of the best-selling Guerrilla Marketing series; and The Information Please Business Almanac, a ground-breaking business reference book.
Fidentia-Norwalk Opinion:
At first I was a little apprehensive about reading this book not having read Purple Cow first, which deals with a lot of the concepts in F.P.I., but Godin quickly covers the main points in Purple Cow to bring you up to speed. In Purple Cow, Godin 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 deals with the all concepts and F.P.I. is basically the “how to” manual that follows. There are three main sections in the book:
- Why you need a Free Prize?
- How you champion an idea?
- How you make Free Prizes
The order in which he covers these points emphasises the importance of championing an idea within an organisation and to get buy-in from all the stakeholders. To do this he suggests numerous, practical tactics ranging from building a prototype, to allowing people to change the idea in some harmless manner so that they can feel it’s there own. When it comes to creating the Free Prizes, he proposes the use of “edgecraft” rather than brainstorming. Every product or service has numerous “edges”, a Free Prize that can transform the product into something remarkable. But you have to take these edges all the way. In the long run only going part of the way is expensive and ineffective.
There are four points from the book which I would recommend that every company seriously consider:
1. "Focus on the unsatisfied."
2. "Make an Invisible Service Visible."
3. "The free prize transcends the utility of the original idea."
4. "When you identify what is broken among your competitors, you have found a free prize."
The concept of a “Free Prize” is interesting and makes the book well worth a look, but Godin’s advice on how to champion an idea make this book essential reading. It gives practical advice on how to bring people through the three periods of an idea as Arthur C. Clarke put them:
1. It cannot be done.
2. It probably can be done, but it is not worth doing.
3. I knew it was a good idea all along!
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