A firm grip on the market
April 21st, 2008 | by Mark Fusco |Church of the Customer blog makes some good points about “free marketing” with the following video,
Jackie uses this video to make a compelling argument for giving away stuff to build an audience. However, I think basically the same thing would have occurred if the hugs were being sold for profit at a reasonable cost.
- Find a favorable market for your product (in this case, a mall safe enough to approach strangers for a hug)
- Employ a safe, approachable and friendly marketing strategy — hugs are intimate things, after all
- Be persistent
- Have an unyielding belief your product is what the market needs and wants
- Get lucky in finding the one person who will trust in you and your product and influence others to do the same
If there was one thought I’ve ever pulled from Jim Collin’s book, “From Good to Great” it was the idea of building momentum, or what he referred to as the flywheel effect,
…picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum—mass times velocity—is what will generate superior economic results over time.
Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all your might, and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then—at some point, you can’t say exactly when—you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.
This is the Flywheel Effect. It’s what it feels like when you’re inside a company that makes the transition from good to great.
If anything, the free hug video is, to me, more of an example of pure marketing gaining momentum than it is in the power of free.