How many coupons have your grabbed offering a FREE! bottle of organic coconut water…even though you don’t drink the stuff?
Or maybe you went to one of those new pizza places that offers all the FREE! pizza toppings you can pile on that round cylinder of dough, even though you weren’t that hungry?
Perhaps you’ve marshalled your way through a tradeshow picking up all the FREE! giveaways the companies had to offer. (Ya, sure…you got them for your kids…uh-huh.)
Getting stuff for free feels good. Very good. Super good.
Zero isn’t simply another number in our pricing arsenal. Zero drives emotions…as I just proved.
Free makes us happy. Free feels irresistible. Free grabs our attention and our action.
Free helps us make decisions. Some are wise. Others? Not so good.
Free becomes a wonderful thing when you’re strolling by a store offering free socks. We can all use some socks.
The issue with Free arises when your customers have to choose between Free and something else. Too often Free leads them to a bad choice. Not the wrong choice. A bad choice.
Free interferes with good decision-making…all too often, and we don’t even see it.
Let’s say you walk into the store to buy some athletic socks, ones that will provide great padding and wicking for your daily jogs. Then you see another pair of socks where you get one FREE when you buy one. Out of the door you go with socks you didn’t want and won’t perform as well as the ones you went in for.
What is it about Free that traps us, sucks us in, and becomes so enticing?
Because every transaction has an upside and a downside.
When something is Free, it provides our emotions with such a charge of energy we perceive the Free thing to be of greater value than it really is.
Use Free as your ally not your accidental enemy. Use it to create the right decisions for your customers. Stop accidently giving them something for Free that leaves them with less than what they came to get.
In the Land of Pricing, Zero isn’t just another number.
Sometimes Free comes with a great cost to your customers. Use it wisely.