The internet extrapolated the concept of Freemium to the extreme. Two of the webs most successful organizations, Google and Facebook, both give away their proprietary product for free. The financial success of free App’s within Apple’s App Store has possibly been the ultimate demonstration the power of Free.
However, it isn’t just as simple as changing your pricing structure. Being ‘Free’ is more than just a pricing change. Customers don’t just look at the numbers when they make value decisions based on the price you set. If, perceptually, the difference between 99p and £1 is big, then the difference between 0p and 1p is even greater. Asking the customer to pay for a product, or even changing your price from 1p to 0p completely changes the expected customer experience.
Jordan Julien over at Social Media Today has done a great job of highlighting this topic. Jordan has gone into even more detail on how Reputation, Belonging, Loyalty and Interaction are all affected by the issue of Free.
By Colin Shaw | Published: January 28, 2010
Do you give any products away for free? Have you any learnings from changing a products price? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.