Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "If you were like me, you nagged your mom to buy the cereal with the free prize inside..." (more)
Key Phrases: soft innovation, free prize inside, free prizes, Purple Cow, New York, Henry Ford (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

According to marketing maven and Purple Cow author Seth Godin, the "Television Industrial Complex"--and its nasty habit of interrupting people with advertisements for things they don't want--is dead. Innovation is cheaper than advertising, advises Godin who defines the "free prize" with diverse examples including swatch watches, frequent flyer miles, dog bakeries, Tupperware parties and portable shredding trucks. He explains "Design matters, style matters, extras matter."

The largest portion of the book is devoted to how to sell an idea to your organization. His specific tactics range from irreverent, (let them pee on your ideas) to practical (how to build a prototype). One standout chapter explains how brainstorming can become boring. His alternative, "edgecraft," involves divergent thinking to add something remarkable to your product. His long grocery list of edges (safety, equality, invisibility, and hours of operation) suggest a genuine marketing manifesto. The ideas are bold and insightful, but can suffer from being presented in less than logical order. The book is also diminished by Godin's self-marketing, from using terminology in his previous books to naming key ideas after himself. These advertisements are unnecessary. This nervy little volume is bound to mother many inventions. --Barbara Mackoff

From Publishers Weekly

A slapdash mix of insight, jargon, common sense, inspiration and hooey, Godin’s follow up to last year’s Purple Cow argues that the way to make any product a bestseller is to couple it with "a feature that the consumer might be attracted to" whether or not she really needs it or wants it. "If it satisfies consumers and gets them to tell other people what you want them to tell other people, it’s not a gimmick," he argues. "It’s a soft innovation." An entrepreneur, lecturer and monthly columnist for Fast Company, Godin knows his business history, and his book bursts with interesting case studies that define "free prize" thinking: e.g. Apple’s iPod, Chef Boyardee’s prehistoric pasta, AOL’s free installation CDs. One of the problems with the book, however, is that its insistent use of needless jargon ("free prize," "purple cow," "edgecraft") clouds complicated issues and lumps dissimilar processes together. "Fix what’s broken," Godin advocates on one page. "Inflame the passionate," he declares on another. Both of these ideas could certainly lead to business improvements, but they hardly use the same methods. Like Godin’s last book, this volume reads like a sugar rush—fast and sweet—and this may propel the author back onto the bestseller lists. To help jumpstart his sales, Portfolio will be packaging the first few thousand copies of the book inside cereal boxes. Now that’s quite a gimmick—er, soft innovation.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover; 1ST edition (May 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591840414
• ISBN-13: 978-1591840411
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #497,921 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars On-the-edge is far safer than status quo!, July 5, 2004

By	Marc A. Pitman "Fundraisingcoach.com" (Waterville, ME USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm a big fan of Seth Godin. His books Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Idea Virus, Purple Cow, and The Big Red Fez continue impact me on an almost daily basis. One thing I love about Seth is that he persuasively argues that in today's economy thinking on-the-edge is far safer than maintaining the status quo.

In Purple Cow, Seth 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 was a thought provoking book but was lacking in helping readers implement the ideas. Free Prize Inside takes it the next step and shows us how to market and create remarkable changes in our organizations.

Free Prize Inside is divided into three sections:
* Why You Need a Free Prize
* Selling the Idea
* Creating the Free Prize

A "free prize" is a soft innovation. Seth builds the case for the urgent need of people in all organizations, including nonprofits, to be championing soft innovations. Soft innovations are the "clever, insightful, useful small ideas that just about anyone in an organization can think up." A free prize may seem like a gimmick at first but it actually becomes an essential part of your product or service. We all know what our favorite cereal tastes like, but it becomes irresistible when we see we can get a free prize inside the box. To illustrate his point, Seth is selling the first printing of this book in a special-made cereal box! You can pre-order a copy at Amazon.com.

He's convinced that anyone can come up with a free prize inside. The problem comes when we share it with others. Seth says our co-workers or boss, ask three basic questions:
1. Is this idea doable?
2. Is it worth doing?
3. Are you the one able to do it successfully?
If they aren't able to answer "yes" to all three questions, they won't join you, and the idea will die. The second section of the book is dedicated to specifically showing us how to keep our innovations alive by championing them and winning the support of others. After all, creating a free prize isn't important if we can't sell it to our organization.

The last section is dedicated to creating the free prizes. What would make your organization remarkable? Here Seth introduces his new concept of "edgecraft." He explains, "You're...caught in the center of a web of boring. The goal of edgecraft is to pick an edge (there are hundreds to choose from) and go all the way with it-even a little further than that if you can. Moving a little is expensive and useless. Moving a lot is actually cheaper in the long run and loaded with wonderful possibilities."

Donuts are boring but Krispy Kreme found an edge and made them sensational. Netflix did the same with movie rentals. They created a free prize by transforming the rental experience and created a very loyal customer following. The United Way found free prize when they discovered the concept of payroll deduction. Pushing that edge has helped them raised a lot of money!

Free Prize Inside is an inspiring and practical way for us to find our organization's edges and push for a free prize. It comes with extensive endnotes that cite Seth's sources, expand on points, and point you to great information on the web. I particularly appreciate Seth's constant attention to the nonprofit sector throughout the book. I highly recommend getting a copy. And, if you order it before it's published in May, you can still get it in a cereal box!

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The 'how t'o for becoming a purple cow, May 12, 2004

By	Meryl K. Evans "Content Maven behind meryl.net" (Plano, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Godin's previous book, Purple Cow, presents examples of how to stand out from the herd. Free Prize Inside shows how to make that happen. It answers questions of "How do you create a Purple Cow?" "How do you make something sell itself?"

When we buy cereal, especially kiddie cereal, what's the best part? The free prizes inside, of course! That's the thinking behind the book.

Free prizes aren't just the stuff you find in cereal or Cracker Jack. Does your credit card offer free airline miles or money towards the next car you buy? That counts. What about an online store offering free shipping? What I remember the most about some tradeshows and expos are the drawings for free prizes, the goodies I received, and the shirts I still have.

This book has impeccable timing. As an editor of a newsletter, I have been struggling to find ideas to pep it up and draw in more subscribers since new subscriptions have slowed down. I cheat and go straight to page 131, the start of the list of "Edges" and look for a spark of creativity to create an "Edgecraft" (book's buzzword) to find a free prize. The goal is to find something to reel people in, to give them something they want like the previously mentioned examples.

I learn from examples and Godin lists plenty of them using Edgecraft in action. He is not saying you have to invent something new to make something happen. It's about taking what you already have going and how to make your product, service, head, blog, whatever worth talking about and watching the results.

With three kids, a spouse, two jobs, a house, and volunteer work, finding time to read a book is a challenge. Even if I weren't a book reviewer, getting through this book would be a breeze because (a) it's 183 pages (the rest are detailed endnotes with references and explanations), (b) it highlights plenty of key points for easy scanning, and (c) each section or idea is short. Getting bite-sized pieces of information is enough to get going with the concepts gleaned from the book and make something happen.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Free Prize Inside contains pearls of wisdom from Godin, February 13, 2006

By	Daniel J. Smith (Waconia, MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mr. Seth Godin's Free Prize Inside is about creating an innovation and then causing it to happen. His premise is that if you make your service or produce worth talking about (make it "remarkable") the word will spread. This is much more effective than advertising, what he refers to as interruption media. Mr. Godin sprinkles interesting observations throughout the book, like this gem - "Just because you have money doesn't mean you can trade it for attention by buying advertising. Consumers have learned how to ignore you."

He describes items included free with a purchase as a gimmick and uses the example of the prize in a Cracker Jack box. He recommends that companies should focus on unsatisfied customers vs. the satisfied customers because unsatisfied customers are the ones that really want a free prize. Gimmicks can work because we buy what we want - "Do we want the fortune cookie or the fortune?"

Because an organization's adoption of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it's a good idea or not, Mr. Godin emphasizes that selling the idea of a soft innovation (the free prize) is as important as the innovation itself. So he tells you first HOW to sell the idea, then he explains ways to CREATE the free prize. He helps you champion innovations by listing 17 tactics that can be used to sell your idea. For example, he describes how to change the mind of a group of people - have the group see tangible proof that everyone else is changing their mind as well.

To find new ideas, he recommends NOT brainstorming but instead using a process that identifies the soft innovations that live on the edge of what already exists - Edgecraft. In his book, Mr. Godin gives 30 ways to apply Edgecraft with real-world examples for each. One good example is Cranium's decision to sell board games at Starbucks - he called this successful innovation the "jump the retail channel" edgecraft.

Mr. Godin uses facts to back up his claims, like Amazons substantial sales increase when they shifted marketing dollars to providing free shipping on all orders. Throughout the book he has a conversational tone that is pleasant. It is an easy read because he uses every day examples and simple graphs to further explain and clarify his statements.

Mr. Godin professes that this is a marketing book. Whether you are in the Marketing department of your organization or not I would highly recommend reading Free Prize Inside. And yes, there is a free prize inside the book!