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Give away the diagnostic, sell the remedy
Companies that employ the “ freemium ” business model give away a product or service for free and then charge for additional features. The freemium model has gotten more popular as the cost to deliver free services has dropped but the cost of employing sales and marketing people hasn’t. One of the hardest questions around freemium models is deciding how to divide free from paid features. One particularly effective version of freemium is: “give away the diagnostic, sell the remedy.” The best known example of this is anti-virus companies that give away free virus scans but charge for virus removers. In fact, this tactic works so well for anti-virus that it almost seems coercive (and has indeed been abused, for example, by “anti-spyware” software that deliberately conflates cookies and viruses).
What Neuroscience Tells Us About Consumer Desire
In the early 1950s, two scientists at McGill University inadvertently discovered an area of the rodent brain dubbed "the pleasure center," located deep in the nucleus accumbens. When a group of lab rats had the opportunity to stimulate their own pleasure centers via a lever-activated electrical current, they pressed the lever over and over again, hundreds of times per hour, foregoing food or sleep, until many of them dropped dead from exhaustion. Further research found pleasure centers exist in human brains, too.My problem(s) with ‘inbound marketing’ – Conversation Marketing
I want to emphasize that this is a friendly discussion between Rand and I—we’re colleagues and friends, plus our companies are close enough together that he could bring his much more numerous minions to Portent and wipe us out in one afternoon of horrifying nerd slap-fighting. I’ve received a few comments I deleted because they seem to be taking things personally. Please read this post, and Rand’s, and the discussion around them, as they’re meant to be read: An interesting discussion about where our industry is headed, and how we should name ourselves. Yes, I'll get hate mail for this one, too. Rand wrote a great post earlier today (or late last night – does he ever sleep?!)
Internet Marketing and the Limitations of Language
posted by Adam Audette | April 10, 2008 | 22 comments Words matter. Words are images, descriptions, and labels. Words convey meaning and nuance; words are symbols.
Despite Backlash, Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Hasn’t Impacted Google’s Market Share
ComScore has released its search data for February 2012, and Google continues to lead, gaining 0.2 percentage points over the previous month, up to 66.4% in February from 66.2% in January. Microsoft sites, which includes its Bing search engine, also continued to hold second place, up just 0.1 percentage points to reach a 15.3% share. Yahoo, meanwhile, dropped 0.3 points to 13.8%, down from 14.1% in January. None of the numbers are all that remarkable, which, when you think about the changes Google recently introduced to its core product involving the fusion of social and search, is actually somewhat remarkable. Trailing the three search leaders were Ask Network at 3.0% and AOL, Inc. (disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL) with 1.5% of the market.