by damonp on August 9, 2005
in Uncategorized
WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price
WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price takes the viewer on a deeply personal journey into the everyday lives of families struggling to fight goliath. From a family business owner in the Midwest to a preacher in California, from workers in Florida to a poet in Mexico, dozens of film crews on three continents bring the intensely personal stories of an assault on families and American values.
I imagine this one will require a big grain of salt, but it’ll probably be worth the watch.
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How do you build inertia in marketing? The more people you can get behind an idea (positively if possible) the more the idea builds upon itself until it reaches a critical mass. Take BitTorrent from Bram Cohen. Started as a pet project he now lives off the donations from users. Not selling the software, DONATIONS.
The perceived value BitTorrent’s users have in the software is worth more than setting a price that a traditional software company would value their software at. Many won’t donate at all, many will donate what they feel is the minimum and still others will donate more than what a company would charge because of the ‘warm fuzzies’ (to use my high school coach’s favorite saying) they get from the software and the good will trust the author has placed in his user’s hands.
What’s one of the easiest ways to kill inertia? Fine Print. If you are trying to do something good for the consumer (ie. provide them with a quailty product and top-notch buying experience) why inundate them with pages of fine print? It kind of kills the ‘warm fuzzies’ doesn’t it?
Seth Godin posts in Tiny cuts some examples of how fine print and poor customer service can kill any marketing effort.
Fine print is everywhere I look. Fine print means that a lawyer has made sure that you probably won’t win a lawsuit, but is the lawsuit really the point?
When did marketers fall in love with the idea of overselling and then hiding, instead of doing precisely the opposite?
Popularity: 1%
