If you can give it away, what have you proven?

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You prove nothing about the value of your product or service by giving it away for free. But if you do give it away, be selective. Use samples to discover (or build) an audience that will advocate your product. Help these advocates pass you along to other paying customers.

If you are a musician, artist, comic book author, or other competitor in a narrow field where work for free is common, then you must give away your product aggressively for years in order to be heard, by way of auditions, sample recordings, MP3s, juried shows, gallery postcards, free comics and mini-comic samples.

Even so, don't give away your product indiscriminately. Many strategies are possible for converting "sample" audiences to paying customers. Your audience has to become hooked in order for you to gain the power to charge a sustainable price and thereby stay in business. (Small businesses should note that IRS rules place a time requirement on your success even if your financial circumstances do not.) Develop several, try them, and fine-tune what works. Constantly improving your product is insufficient by itself. Design it to be used increasingly, and to be needed or wanted increasingly by those who connect with it.

Examples?

- Each of your product releases is completely different from the one before it, yet similar enough to the previous one to be recognizable as yours and interesting to the class of people who bought it last time. It helps to have a pretty firm grasp on why people buy your brand. Example: Icelandic pop musician Bjork

- Your product requires continuous or repeated use in order to continue delivering benefits to the buyer. Examples: many pharmaceutical products; many personal products such as vitamins, soaps, detergents, lotions and shampoos.

- Your product cannot really be evaluated without experiencing it, yet will be desired after the experience. Examples: perfume, music, many other forms of entertainment. Think radio singles and movie trailers.

- Your product can be delivered once, live, (perhaps by a high-cost professional), and then purchased to take home and reordered many times. Examples: music. Live performances are indispensible to the sale of recordings. Also: high-end cosmetics that are demonstrated by professional makeup artists have a much higher percieved value and need only be demonstrated once. The cost of the demonstration can often be passed along directly to the buyer.

...and many more!

The recurring theme? If you break the rules, you must have a strategy to mitigate the risk. Don't do it for the sake of trying something new in your marketing.

Building a case = Building a brand

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Everything in marketing is building a case for something, as a skilled lawyer would do in a courtroom. Think of branding as arguments made at an emotional level about your company.

To brand a company effectively, be very clear about the case you want to make. What the marketplace is to believe and feel about your company - customers, potential customers, investors, regulators, and others - is your lodestar.

Building a brand involves a blend of analytical research, creativity, human insight, and business strategy. It happens over time, not in a single project.

It also doesn't happen in your marketing department.

What the company does is the brand. The people who deliver the company's products and services will ultimately own your brand. Whatever the brand is, they will deliver it.

It helps if everyone carrying the flag for your company has meaningful, coherent messages to pass along about it. Preferably messages that build your case and don't conflict with each other.

Your marketing and PR people must grasp - in fairly rigorous operational detail - what the company does in order to facilitate a case for what's special about it. And their role is to facilitate the organization's telling of its own story.

Are your marketing materials are more compelling than the message they deliver about your company? If so, then marketing isn't helping your company. It's just giving your marketers something to do.

Everything you do and say builds a case for something. Let your case be compelling. Customers are always willing to discover greatness.