ESTABLISHING A GIFTING PROGRAM

Ever since Denny’s free breakfast give away, it seems like restaurant chains like McDonald's and KFC are falling all over themselves to give out freebies.

Let’s be honest. All these freebies are just glorified sampling. And samples are free. So I shouldn’t have a problem with them. But I kind of do.

Sampling is a negotiation. The proposition: you give me your time and consideration and I’ll give you a treat. All I expect in return is that you spend your money with me. Please? (You kind of owe me.)

Is tacitly guilting a person into doing business with you a sustainable model?

Rather than a sampling program, maybe consider a gifting program. Gifts don’t come with strings attached. The best gifts are unexpected. And they are a reward of sorts for being a good friend. Gifting asks for nothing in return.

Providing unexpected gifts to best customers can create a lot more goodwill and sustained growth than doling out freebies to complete strangers and deal seekers.

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Are You Looking for Consensus or Inspiration?

Over the past couple decades it seems we’ve evolved our market research practices to weed out respondents with extreme biases.   We don’t want to include anyone in our research who rejects our product or uses too much of it. We don’t want anyone who is too shy or too talkative. Too young or too old. Too savvy or too inexperienced.

We go to extreme lengths to capture the opinions of the “average” customer. However, now more than ever, it’s the biased customer - not the average customer - that is driving our businesses.

Morgan Spurlock was biased. He would have never met the focus group criteria. But his film perhaps changed how McDonald’s does business moreso than any other piece of consumer research that company conducted over the past 50 years.

Marketers who try to eliminate biases from their research are sacrificing inspiration for consensus.

Each marketer has to ask themselves this key question: Would I rather hear one uniform opinion from eight identical people or eight different opinions from eight different types of people?

To truly come up with innovative solutions and ideas, we need to find mechanisms for harvesting diverse viewpoints.

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