Upside Downturn

Everyone loves something free. And free stuff involving food or drink is really great. That’s why it’s a shame that the great art of sampling – promoting your product by giving bits away free – is such a shame. When it happens in my local supermarket it just seems to be a bored member of staff with a table of tiny cardboard cups and a pile of coupons.

Compare that to the days of the innocent grass van appearing in the car park or hot girls passing out whole packets of Walkers crisps. I guess that there are two things that mean that those days are gone forever:

1. Brands have less money to splash around, or have found the cost effectiveness of sampling not so good as it was.

2. The internet made a mini-industry out of people collating and compiling brand offers and turned it into a kind of quick way of grabbing freebies without considering what they were or if they were wanted.

The last one was compounded offline by those ruthless pensioners you always find hanging round at giveaways. Circling round endlessly and stuffing their mouths and hadbags full of stuff that they’d have no intention of eating or drinking otherwise.

However, I don’t think the idea of letting people have things for free should be underestimated. True, it’s more suited as a business model for the net (Hotmail, Flickr) than for the real world but there’s much to be gained by letting people ‘taste’ your product.

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