Page 64 - 100 Great Marketing Ideas (100 Great Ideas)

28 SET THE PRICE, EVEN
ON THINGS YOU ARE
GIVING AWAY

It’s an interesting facet of the human psyche that we don’t value
things that we get for nothing. There was the famous example of
the man trying to give away £5 notes on the street—and no one
accepted them, suspecting a catch.

Many organizations have free newsletters or house magazines
that they send out to staff and other stakeholders, knowing that
(probably) most of them end up in the bin. On the other hand, who
would pay for a newsletter or a brochure from a company?

The idea

The Marketer is the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s magazine. It
is sent out free to all members, and although there is a mechanism
for non-members to subscribe, virtually all the readers get the
magazine for free. This is fairly obvious, since the circulation of
the magazine is around 37,000 copies per month, and CIM has a
worldwide membership of 47,000.

However, it does have a cover price on it of £10 (which is in itself
enough to deter any would-be non-member subscribers). The
purpose of putting a price on the cover of a free magazine is
twofold: first, it gives an impression of quality that is absent from
a free magazine. Second, it gives the recipients the impression that
they have been given something of real value, not simply something
that is cheap and disposable. For Institute members, the cost of the
magazines (at £10 a time) is just over half the annual membership

100 GREAT MARKETING IDEAS • 55