Comments on: A little experiment ….

By: David Churbuck

David Churbuck — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:55:18 +0000

Good points Mark, but I’m a web 1.0 guy at heart — we made up our losses with volume!

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 31 May 2008 05:28:21 +0000

David,

A for a cool idea. But, suppose you allow, oh, 10 sales a year per employee, and you drove 1000 employees to do this. 10K units. Not bad. The test is whether you’ve just unlocked incremental revenue for your brand, or just gave away margin.

Was there a secondary benefit of unique relationship building which will pay out further dividends? Perhaps. You almost need a social map to track those who purchased through the program to see how that worked out.

What if you added a referrer discount, to take that core group of 10K, and in turn given them a magic wand to knock, oh 5% off anyone else’s order that they could talk into buying?

With all these things, the challenge seems to be unlocking organic growth without selling out your brand value which normally commands (in theory) a higher margin.

By: David Vivero

David Vivero — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:37:16 +0000

Don’t feel bad, Dave. You made this reader very happy. Note that I use FriendFeed combined with the AlertThingy, which makes all past Tweets locally stored and searchable. But I promise to keep it to myself!

By: Uncle Fester

Uncle Fester — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:13:51 +0000

I’m good for a bunch of those each year. This year, I should be at 4.

Next year, I put your code up for sale on ebay…

kidding!

And those aren’t followers. I shan’t call them by name here.

By: Kris Rzepkowski

Kris Rzepkowski — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:41:08 +0000

David, I’m sure you are onto something here. We know that the employee pricing promotions have moved thousands of cars for the auto makers. I think you’ve got the blueprint for social media-supported employee pricing promotions. It’s the perfect win-win for product companies looking to empower their employees as marketers, and to boost sales.
Cool stuff.

By: Stace

Stace — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:20:55 +0000

David – this made me laughingly recall a similar incident at long gone, early-days internet retailer valueamerica.com. We had a “Value Dollars” program that went awry and we were literally giving away the store for a few days.

Of course, that’s very different than using your code to promote the products – what might be interesting is if you can place a condition on the code: “Can we follow up with you in a few months to see how things are going?” and likely you turn the Twitter discount-hunters into Lenovo advocates, well worth the discount.

I know that was the plan all along… and I think you could avoid persecution from your Purchase Program Peers by simply explaining: This brave new world is all about experimentation.