Does marriage count?
/s
- Cracked Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 to full Minecraft Beta 1.9 Prerelease 5. (I don’t like Microsoft and Notch is a Nazi)
- Cheese (before I was vegan. I kinda miss free food sampling)
- Monthly countrywide public transit ticket (well 9€ wasn’t free, but for a net of 39,000 km railway alone plus every other PT except HSR, it basically is). 49€ now, 58€ in 2025 (=> Subsidy regimes are not on parity to motorised individual traffic)
- Library subscription
Plasticity (3d software)
Yeah.
Mini story.
Back in the day, me and my best friend got on a mailing list for samples. We didn’t do it intentionally, but it ended up being pretty cool. We’d get all kinds of stuff. Some of it was shit, some was good, the way you’d expect.
But over the years, those samples worked. Sensodyne, the toothpaste for example. Tried a sample, and since it’s as good as anything else as toothpaste, the fact that I preferred the taste more than most was enough to switch.
But the cool shit was when they’d ask for feedback. Sometimes you’d get full sized freebies.
One of those was the candy, take 5. A pretzel with caramel, covered in chocolate. This was before they were for sale. We tried the samples, sent in the little card, and a few weeks later got boxes in the mail full of the samples, asking us to get other people to try it. So, we did, and those people usually sent the cards that came in the box the we gave them.
Turned out that the little number on the card was our number. So, when people sent in the cards with feedback, they knew it was us doing their marketing for them (that’s what the whole thing is, it wasn’t just them being nice). Well, another month or two passed, and we see them in stores. And we would buy them here and there, because they are insanely good, if a tad too sweet overall.
Then, we got more boxes from them, packed with the full sized packages, plus a whole booklet of coupons, and a surprisingly nice little form letter of thanks. It ended up being something like fifty free packages, twenty free coupons plus another twenty of half price.
Would you say the amount you received in thanks is roughly worth the amount of work you did by marketing and relaying feedback? I’m just curious.
Honestly, yeah.
It took next to zero effort, and it was a product I liked enough to have recommended even if the only thing I had gotten was the first sample.
It’s really the best kind of marketing I’ve ever run across. They made it so that the only work involved was handing something small to someone, plus the original feedback. If the product had sucked, even that effort wasn’t mandatory.
Video games, for sure.
