Firebrand

We live in an economy that’s based in reciprocity: I do something for you and you give me something (typically money.) Everything is a transaction with tangible goods or services for money. Nothing is truly for free.

Now, marketers and companies know if they give something away, their business can grow in unpredictable ways. It’s the karmic model of marketing. The freemium is a part of this; there is rarely a piece of software or a website that does not offer a free version or a trial of their service. I call this the drug dealer model: the fist taste is free. This was always the model for most art forms. For music you could listen to a song on the radio for free (essentially) in the hopes that you would be enticed to buy the album or go to the concert. With art you could always few a painting in a gallery or the artist studio with the artist hoping you would purchase it for free.

Now the marketing world is taking it one step further because of the tendency of the web and our connected society to make things viral. We see this all the time in the marketing community with free eBooks. I’ll freely tell you that is the strategy I am counting on when I provide the insights here in this blog. I provide this content with no expectation. Now I would be happy if you enjoyed it and told other people who would enjoy about it, but I have no expectation of that. I don’t force you to email 3 people about the blog before I show you the latest post. There is no transaction. I do this for myself, and the hope that you will enjoy it.

Now the karmic marketing model and the reciprocity based society don’t mix. They create dissonance with people. Our society tells us that every thing is a tic for tat transaction, but people are trying to give us stuff for free. As a result people have an ingrained mistrust. They are looking for the hook. “Why are you doing this? Do you want my money? Email address? My time? Personal information? My contacts? A reference? Etc. Etc”

This basic mistrust of anything being given away is a fundamental resistance that you need to disarm if you are going to give something of value away.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

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