Free Prize Inside Book Summary - Free Prize Inside Book explained in key points

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Free Prize Inside summary

Name: Free Prize Inside
Rating: 4.4 (115 reviews)
Author: Seth Godin

Seth Godin

The Next Big Marketing Idea

4.4 (115 ratings)

29 mins

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Simplify Podcast Marketing Sales

Table of Contents

Free Prize Inside
Summary of 10 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 10

What’s in it for me? Take your marketing game to the next level by thinking about the small things.

If you're old enough, you may remember that back in the day, breakfast cereal boxes used to target children by announcing a “free prize inside.” For parents, it was just some cheap plastic junk. But to the kids who coveted the prize, it was more like a treasure, and they begged their parents to buy the cereal.

Putting aside any ethical questions about marketing to children, it was a clever marketing strategy. The “free prizes” lived up to their name – but only for the cereal companies. They barely cost anything to produce, but they delivered quite a prize. They boosted sales, without any need to change the core product or launch an expensive advertising campaign.

Imagine if you could come up with a similar “free prize” for your product, service, or business. Imagine if a simple bonus feature could make it seem just as special and irresistible to your customers as that silly little toy in a cereal box. And what if you could recapture that magic with a minimal amount of resources, expenditure, or risk?

Well, you don’t have to just imagine it; you’re about to learn how to make it a reality.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why big innovations are often a dead-end;
why smaller-scale innovations are a more viable path to success; and
how to come up with those innovations and bring them to fruition.

Expensive advertising campaigns and big innovations are no longer a ticket to success.

Imagine you’re running a company that’s run into trouble. Your profits are stagnant, and your product is yesterday’s news. How do you turn things around?

Traditionally, you’d take one of two approaches. The first is to launch a major advertising campaign. Back in the twentieth century, this was enough to draw attention to your product. If people were ignoring your product on the store shelves, you could force them to pay attention to it through magazine ads or television commercials.

But in the twenty-first century, advertising has lost its power. There are so many ads and other forms of media vying for attention that they end up blending together like white noise. Most people just tune it out.

The key message here is: Expensive advertising campaigns and big innovations are no longer a ticket to success.

So what’s the alternative? That brings us to the second traditional approach, which is to try to come up with a big, game-changing innovation. The economic rationale here is simple. If you create a desirable product or service that no other company is currently capable of making or delivering, you can get away with charging a premium price for it. After all, you won’t have any pesky competition to worry about – at least until your rivals catch up to you. In the meantime, you’ll be raking in the cash all by yourself.

To corner a market and obtain high profit margins, many companies pour money into massive technology projects, product roll-outs, or research and development programs. The bigger the innovation, the bigger the potential pay-off, or so the thinking goes. Just imagine the money you could make if you created the next iPod of your industry! But there’s a flip side to this line of thinking: big innovations require big investments – and big investments lead to big gambles, which often go bust.

Back in the late 1990s, a telecommunications company called Iridium learned this lesson the hard way. They spent $3 billion on launching 66 communication satellites into orbit. It was a risky bet – and it didn’t pay off. The company went bankrupt.

Here’s the problem: if you’re spending $3 billion on getting your product or service off the ground, you need to make $3 billion just to break even. The more you spend on big innovations, the more you raise your threshold for success, and the more you open yourself up to failure.

Okay, so what’s the real alternative? You’ll find out the answer to that question in the next blink.

With small-scale inventions, you’re more likely to make a profit in today’s economy.

From TED Talk speakers to business book writers, nearly everyone seems to agree that innovation is the key to success in the modern economy. And many would argue that we need to “think big” in order to innovate. After all, very few people get excited about minor technical improvements, like a computer with slightly better processing power. If you want to grab the public’s attention, you’ve got to unleash a product or service that’s revolutionary, right?

Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by “revolutionary.” Is it something that’s going to transform society radically, like Thomas Edison’s light bulb? In that case, you’re probably thinking too big.

If you want your soft innovation to succeed, it needs to make your product or service remarkable and desirable.

Think of the last time you learned about a hot new product. How did it appear on your radar? Chances are it wasn’t through a traditional ad. It was probably through some form of word-of-mouth communication. Maybe you heard about it in a conversation. Or perhaps you read about it online.

Now that advertising is no longer as effective, word-of-mouth is how most products or services gain traction these days. People talk about them. But if you want people to talk about your product, you’ve got to give them a reason to talk about it. And that means it needs to be remarkable – as in, worthy of being remarked upon to other people.

Use the technique of edgecraft to identify a soft innovation that can give you and your customers a free prize.

All right, so all you need to do now is come up with an idea for a free prize that will make your product or service so remarkable and desirable that people will be buzzing about it. That sounds like one of those things that’s much easier said than done. But in this case, it’s actually pretty easy to do. There’s a simple technique for finding a soft innovation that will give you a leg up over the competition. Call it edgecraft – the art of giving your product or service an edge.

The key message here is: Use the technique of edgecraft to identify a soft innovation that can give you and your customers a free prize.

When coming up with ideas for an edge, think outside the box by looking outside your industry.

Now that we’ve looked at the general concept of edgecraft, let’s roll up our sleeves and dig into the specifics of how to implement it. To get started, imagine you have a product, service, or business that you want to take to the edge, but you’re drawing a blank on what to do with it. How do you come up with an innovative idea?

You don’t need to wait for a lightbulb moment or practice some sort of sophisticated brainstorming technique. There’s a simple, four-step process you can use to jumpstart your thinking and find a shortcut to your edge.

The extent of the edges you can explore is limited only by your imagination.

If you flip through a dictionary, you can take just about any adjective and turn it into your edge: excessive, fashionable, ergonomic, sensuous, interactive, convenient – the list of possible edges goes on and on. We can’t possibly cover all of them, so let’s focus on just a few that provide some broader lessons about the art of edgecraft.

The key message here is: The extent of the edges you can explore is limited only by your imagination.

Your own organization will often be the main obstacle in the way of your idea.

Feeling ready to get out there and start practicing your edgecraft? If so, there’s good news and bad news. Let’s start with the good news: By the end of the day, you could probably come up with a dozen fantastic ideas for edges you could integrate into your product, service, or business.

But here’s the bad news: coming up with an idea for an edge is the easy part. Making it a reality is where the real challenge lies. However, the problem that makes it so challenging isn’t what you might expect.

You need to convince your colleagues of the feasibility of your idea.

It would be great if your colleagues popped open a bottle of champagne and toasted your new idea the moment you announced it. But as we’ve seen, they’re probably going to be resistant to your idea when they first hear about it.

To break through that resistance, you’ll need to gain leverage from your organization by building a fulcrum. That means finding a pressure point where you can effectively position your idea and use it to lever your organization over to your side. In the abstract, this sounds vague and complicated, but in practice, it’s actually pretty simple and clear-cut. It’s just a matter of answering a few basic questions about your idea. First question: Will it work?

You also need to convince your colleagues that your idea is worth pursuing.

At this point, you’ve overcome your colleagues’ skepticism about whether your idea can be implemented. But that still leaves them wondering about the next question you need to answer: assuming this can be done, is it worth doing in the first place?

The key message here is: You also need to convince your colleagues that your idea is worth pursuing.

Before you pitch your idea, make sure you’ve built up your reputation as a leader.

Now that you’ve convinced your colleagues that your idea is a winner, there’s just one last thing you need to sell them on: yourself. After all, you’re the one spearheading the initiative. Maybe it’s the most workable and worthwhile innovation since sliced bread – but unless you have the leadership skills to guide your team and turn it into a reality, your idea will just be that: a thing that exists only in your head.

The key message here is: Before you pitch your idea, make sure you’ve built up your reputation as a leader.

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What is Free Prize Inside about?

Free Prize Inside (2004) provides practical answers to one of the most pressing questions facing marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners today: In a world where people no longer pay attention to traditional advertising, how can you stand out from the crowd and reach your audience? Seth Godin shows that by tapping into the power of small-scale innovations, you can make your product, service, or company so remarkable, it will generate enough buzz to break through the noise of modern life.

Best quote from Free Prize Inside

Theres no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely the organization is to embrace it.

—Seth Godin

Who should read Free Prize Inside?

Entrepreneurs seeking their next big idea
Marketers searching for alternatives to traditional advertising
Business owners wanting to give their product or service an edge

About the Author

Seth Godin is a best-selling author, public speaker, and entrepreneur. He has written 19 books, including the New York Times bestseller Tribes and the Wall Street Journal bestseller Purple Cow, which is the prequel to Free Prize Inside. He was the founder of Squidoo and Yoyodyne, as well as altMBA – an online leadership and management training program. In 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame.

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