One Reason Companies Don't Do 'Free': They're Scared Of Pissing Off Those Who Bought?
from the could-be... dept
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, whose experiments with how people value "free" we've discussed before, has a fascinating column in the Harvard Business Review, explaining why companies don't experiment, where the basic answer is that they're afraid that some consumers will get a less acceptable experience during the experiment compared to others. For example, Ariely had worked for a while with a company to get them to put in place a series of experiments to see if offering things for "free" worked -- but eventually the company balked:Several months later, right before we were due to go live, we had a meeting about the final details of the experiment--this time with a bigger entourage from marketing. One of the new members noted that because we were extending differing offers, some customers might buy a product that was not ideal for them, spend too much money, or get a worse deal overall than others. He was correct, of course. In any experiment, someone gets the short end of the stick. Take clinical medical trials, I said to the team. When testing chemotherapy treatments, some patients suffer more so that, down the road, others might suffer less. I hoped this put it in perspective. Fortunately, I said, price testing household products requires far less suffering than chemo trials.I'm not actually convinced Ariely is correct on the reasoning here. It might not be this "beautiful human sentiment" where they "don't want to treat any [customer] unfairly." I suspect that it's the same reason why dynamic pricing often gets shunned by companies: because if customers find out that someone else got a better deal, even if they were happy with the original deal they suddenly change their minds and believe they got ripped off. It's because we tend to judge things relatively, rather than in absolutes, and companies that have been caught charging different prices to different customers often have found that the backlash is worse than the benefits of differential pricing.
But I could tell I was losing them. In a sense, I was impressed. It was a beautiful human sentiment they were conveying: We care about all customers and don't want to treat any one of them unfairly. A debate ensued among the group: Are we willing to sacrifice some customers "just" to learn how the new pricing approaches work?
They hedged. They asked me what I thought the best approach was. I told them that I was willing to share my intuition but that intuition is a remarkably bad thing to rely on. Only an experiment gives you the evidence you need. In the end, it wasn’t enough to convince them, and they called off the project.
However, it is interesting that many companies fear experimenting and prefer to just make a decision and go with it. I think this is less true in some tech companies. Google, for example, is infamous in their ridiculous level of experimenting and detailed A-B testing on things before going live with a final decision. But for companies that are worried about how any sort of "experiment" is viewed by consumers, you could see them being afraid to even try a concept like "free." I'm not convinced this is really a strong enough effect to keep companies from using "free," but it could be one explanation for why legacy companies are often so resistant to the idea.
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Filed Under: dan ariely, economics, free, harvard business review
Companies: google
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It doesn't seem to bother the Airlines
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But if we talk about things that really are high in inherent value, the price effect is much less noticeable. In fact, I think that most people find the things of the greatest value to them are things which were free or very low cost.
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outlier
I dunno, I guess I'm just not into envy.
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But sometimes I *do* hit those sales, so I also get over it quickly (unless the price difference is really steep, then I'm miffed...and curious...and wondering if I got ripped).
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Apple, Orange?
Google products at the consumer level are another.
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Then explain why Amie Street and other Variable Pricing Model sites are doing so well ...
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Seen before
People don't want to feel like they were ripped off - but sometimes that is what happens - the electronics industry uses this model all the time - but they are usually smarter and change the model number before lowering the price. The fact is the first 42 inch flat panel TV's cost $20,000 - now they can be purchased for $500 and they are better.
If you spend your whole life looking over your shoulder to check if you were ripped off you will be very unhappy.
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Honestly, I'd try for a joke here, but that typo has me giggling uncontrollably....
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Oh, the Humanity...
Am I cynical? Yes. But that doesn't mean I'm not right.
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Sort of a combination of micro-payments and investing. Instead of funding a project only by corporate interests anyone is free to make an initial 'investment' in the work. When the funding goal is reached production begins; for multi-result units, like songs, videos, or chapter style media investment might be more incremental.
After production of a unit has been funded additional buyers pay less for a copy of it. Likely degrading along a decay curve. Former investors also get a small cut of the 'profit' but it would be too small to waste with fees transferring around.
Instead the 'profit' could only be re-invested in new works, since the investor made a sound decision about what was of value to their community.
For popular works the very first investors would probably get all of their input investment back to use for other projects. After a pre-agreed profit limit is reached the entire work would shift in to promotional mode, the cost only enough at that point to cover distribution.
Dead end works would occur as well, but in those cases the investors would at least receive the work they'd paid for, which should have been at a price they were willing to pay to see said result.
Production houses that fail to deliver the expected quality would also quickly be sorted out and taken care of by the market and network effects.
'investors' would all end up paying similar prices eventually, at least for a given work. (The price would trend like a very flattened bell-curve. Those investing in the middle paying only about what their convenience factor was for seeing the content earlier.)
Additionally the inherent transparency requirement would ensure competition among both production houses and content proposers.
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Short answer is: No
So innovation and experimentation falls to the small or even one-man outfit.
Case in point: Baen Books. The late and sorely-missed Jim Baen started selling eBooks as "Webscriptions" in late 1999. They took off like a homesick angel, and it is my understanding that they have a: always made money and b: always increased sales of the paper books.
In mid-2000, Baen experimented even further and created the Free Library, downloadable books for free. Among other people, Eric Flint contributed his first novel, "Mother of Demons," which I, for one, had never heard of. It was NOT available on the site on a "for pay" basis. Eric has commented that that book is still in print and selling, long after it would normally have disappeared into the maw of the used book market.
But the experiment was possible because one man had the vision and the power to make it real. In a large, impersonal corptocracy, that's just not gonna happen.
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The real problem with "free" is that incumbent businesses do not want to cannibalize existing markets. For example, Google can give away access to an online office suite in a way that leaves them better off (with very little downside risk), Microsoft has to be more circumspect.
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I remember two particular incidents
The offence here was to promise prices would only rise.
Another was when Amazon got clever enough to spot returning big spenders and show them higher prices than the average unidentified joe. When people spotted it ("hey, if I delete cookies the prices on Amazon go down - WTF ?") there was an outcry.
I bought a book once and found myself on the author's mailing list (for reasons unrelated to my book purchase). In less than a year I had been sent a free eBook of the same title as a taster to get me to spend money on something else. So I figured this guy is happy to hand out free eBooks. When I saw another of his books for free download as a PDF, (on a site that with hindsight may not have been authorised to offer it) I was not morally worried about downloading because the author is in the habit of giving these away and probably set this up too.
To put it more briefly, I subconsciously value his eBooks lower now (even though they are good books).
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Price?
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