Free Prize Inside
The Next Big Marketing Idea
Chapter One
Why You Need a Free Prize
Can I Get It, Mom?
If you were like me, you nagged your mom to buy the cereal with the free prize inside.
You bought Cracker Jacks to get the goofy little prize, too. We may have known that the
cereal without a prize was just as good, but of course, it wasn't just as good. It didn't
have a prize.
In those days, cereal makers had it easy. They could offer a free prize and create amazing
advertising as well. They could charge a significant premium over the generic brands if
they had a talking tiger or a toucan or a Cap'n riding a boat through a sea of milk.
Today, of course, that's no longer true. Cereal isn't the cash machine it used to be, there
are too many brands, not enough shelf space and a newly cost-sensitive consumer that
isn't fooled by TV advertising.
All we've got left is the prize. The only way to stand out and command noncommodity
pricing is to innovate. You can innovate with a licensed character or a cool shape or high-protein
ingredients. You can innovate with packaging or pricing or even-yes, it's true-by
putting a cool prize in the box.
It's not only cereal. More than a decade ago, when Lincoln-Mercury started put ... read full excerpt from Free Prize Inside!: The Next Big Marketing Idea ebook
