Why Free is the Future of Business and Marketing

Why "Free" is the future of business and marketing

A few months ago, I read an fascinating article by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine, called Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.

To sum it up all in a few words, the focus of the article is that the new business model revolves around giving away a large amount of products and services for free. Basically, “Freeconomics” works like this: you create a buzz, rope people in with free stuff, and then when you’ve got them hooked, you turn them into loyal customers and make a hefty profit.

This kind of thing has been going on for years, especially on college campuses, where credit card companies, banks and cell phone carriers set up kiosks in the student center and try to hook the new freshmen. It’s good business strategy and it works. Today, information and internet based companies like Google, Yahoo! and YouTube have mastered this model, although companies that sell physical goods like Gillette have built successful campaigns on this model as well.

What about photographers, can Freeconomics work for us too? I’m sure that it can, but it requires a certain level of creativity in order to carry out the method. We have so much fewer customers compared to companies like Gillette and Google, so we can’t really afford to give away too much of our work for free without going broke and severely damaging the overall state of our already fragile industry.

There is room, though, and if we can find the right circumstances, we can certainly benefit from this type of strategy. In my own business, I give away note card sets and prints to prospective and past clients. I figure that with the labor it takes to assemble my cards and the small margin that I get from selling them, it’s ultimately worth more to get them in the hands of potential clients than to make a few bucks. If your own business model revolves around selling prints and cards to the public, then giving away or raffling off your product helps generate a buzz, especially if you do it on the internet through one of your social media outlets.

Also, I’ll occasionally do portrait shoots for free, in exchange for model releases if I think I can make future stock income from the images. In the past few months, I’ve even shot a couple of entire assignments for free, because I knew that A. they would fill in a gap that I had in my portfolio, and B., in one case, I helped out a very good client of mine, who has already passed on some great work to me. Since then, I’ve gotten really positive response and shot similar jobs because of those efforts, and I’ve also made money from a couple of the shots through one of my agencies.

I’ve even got a few more ideas in mind that I intend to try out soon. I’ll let you know how they work. In the meantime, give some thought to this. What can you give away and how can it ultimately benefit your business?

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Dan Bailey is a professional adventure, outdoor and travel photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska. Follow his own blog at danbaileyphoto.com/blog and see his daily updates at facebook.com/danbaileyphoto.

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