Is the power of free a way for market researchers to increase the value of market research inside our companies?
Free as a market-shifting paradigm seems to be the rage. Like some of you, I’m guessing, I’m reading Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. You can read it free online or download the audiobook.
Then too you may have read Malcolm Gladwell’s fierce review in the New Yorker in which Gladwell dismantles some of the platitudes in Anderson’s work.
Anderson essentially argues that in today’s marketplace (and extending into the 21st century) digital distribution is driving the price of content to essentially zero, or free.
Like Gladwell, I am disquieted by some of Anderson’s effulgence about the power of free. While arguably, the digital age has enabled lots more content to be free, it has enabled at lot more crap into the information stream. (And yes, I understand as Anderson argued in The Long Tail (2006), the digital age is rapidly developing the tools to separate the good from the bad and ugly, at least as it is defined in the eye of the beholder).
While free can be a magic word in marketing, it can create the backlash of devaluing the content or product because it may, or may not, have value.
As a market researcher, I encountered one amusing aspect of the free controversy long before its current rise to prominence.
Coincidently, the firm for which I worked was a pioneer of “free” in financial services. Indeed, the launch of the business was premised on stripping out a much disliked annual fee to attract consumers. And it worked. Overwhelmingly. In less than three years, the business grew from launch to number two (in volume) in its area of business. All based on free, and continuing additional innovations.
To be continued shortly.
Dr. Bob
