100 Great Marketing Ideas. From leading companies around the world

Price accordingly—people do not mind paying more if they are getting more.

In practice
• Identify products that carry a long-term commitment to buying peripherals, spares, or other consumables.

• Decide your target market—there is no point giving out freebies to all and sundry if they aren’t going to follow through and buy your product later.

• Make sure you have good intellectual property rights (patents, etc.) so that nobody can enter the market with knock-off consumables that work with your giveaway product.

MAKING YOUR MARKETING fun for customers is what makes them tell other people about you. This is the basis of viral marketing—the word of mouth that ultimately generates more business than all the advertising campaigns put together.

• Do something that is fun.

• Ensure that it is as easy as possible for someone to tell others about the experience.

• Try to have something tangible attached to the experience so that there is a permanent reminder of the event.

• Be careful that the message (in this case, “We like to have fun”) does not detract from the rest of the brand image.

MAKING YOUR MARKETING fun for customers is what makes them tell other people about you.

Identify products that carry a long-term commitment to buying peripherals, spares, or other consumables.

• Decide your target market—there is no point giving out freebies to all and sundry if they aren’t going to follow through and buy your product later.

• Make sure you have good intellectual property rights (patents, etc.) so that nobody can enter the market with knock-off consumables that work with your giveaway product.

Research shows that the more someone is intrigued by the message, the more he or she remembers it and acts on it.

He began by mailing out sets of chopsticks to every marketing lecturer in the country: the chopsticks were packed in metallic silver envelopes with the message “First you eat.” This created an instant message intrigue—the physical product (the chopsticks) and the enigmatic message combined to create a feeling that something interesting was about to happen. About a week later, the same lecturers were sent another envelope containing a tea bag and the message “Then you drink.” This further increased the sense of anticipation—what would arrive next? The next package contained a fortune cookie and a sample chapter of the book, with the message “Then you see your future.”

MAKING YOUR MARKETING fun for customers is what makes them tell other people about you. This is the basis of viral marketing

• Make sure you have good intellectual property rights (patents, etc.) so that nobody can enter the market with knock-off consumables that work with your giveaway product.

When a product is revolutionary, few people want to be the first to try it, so asking them for money up front often simply creates a barrier. In some cases, this is just something we have to live with, but if owning the product means that the customer will have to buy repeatedly, giving away something that creates a dependency is good business.

we don’t GIVE the customer what he or she needs, we SELL the customer what he or she needs

research conducted in the 1950s by two American academics (Leon Festinger and James M. Carlsmith) brought out an interesting phenomenon: people who are offered a big reward for persuading a friend to do something are LESS likely to succeed at it than are people who are offered a small reward

The Avon representatives were themselves women looking to earn some money in their spare time, often neighbors of their customers, so that a visit from the Avon representative was a social event as well as a shopping opportunity.

taking the product to the customer through their door-to-door service

people do not mind paying more if they are getting more.

Lumix camera range, they