Cause Marketing

Tuesday’s post was about the increasing use of ‘free’ as a business model. No less a company than Google is built on ‘free.’ So are Craigslist and Facebook and Flickr. And free is coming on like a lion. AOL used to be primarily a subscription-based service. But every year their subscriber base shrinks. Nowadays, as a free portal, AOL.com is the fourth most-visited Web property. The mighty Wall Street Journal’s online version had a subscription model. But Rupert Murdoch, who recently purchased the Journal, announced that it will soon be largely free. It will no doubt grow as a result. As Chris Anderson writes in his cover story, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” in the March 2008 Wired magazine : “People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.” “The huge psychological gap between ...

Of a sudden one of the hottest marketing concepts around is ‘free.’ But is free sustainable or even possible for organizations that are already not-for-profit? I’ll tackle that question in Thursday’s post. But first, what is ‘free’? On a recent show, Oprah told her viewers that Suze Orman’s book Women and Money could be downloaded for free from Oprah’s site for 33 hours. During that time 1.1 million copies were downloaded in English and another 19,000 in Spanish. The graphic above… from TitleZ via the blog longtail.com … shows that sales of the book on Amazon improved dramatically after the giveaway. That example comes from author Chris Anderson, who says that Free is being driven by the declining costs of digital processing, storage and bandwidth. Anderson, who is the editor of Wired magazine and the author of influential book “The Long Tail,” has another book coming out soon on the business value of giving it away for free . What other examples are there? Google, which gives away ...