{"id":7795,"date":"2009-03-06T07:53:42","date_gmt":"2009-03-06T07:53:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/just_give_it_away_at_first.html"},"modified":"2009-03-06T07:53:42","modified_gmt":"2009-03-06T07:53:42","slug":"just-give-it-away-at-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/technology\/just-give-it-away-at-first.html","title":{"rendered":"Just Give it Away (at first)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am sitting here at the DFW airport, looking forward to getting home but not thrilled about the 50 degree temperature drop I will be experiencing. While at the food court furiously checking email and blogging, a McDonald&#8217;s representative walked around with free samples of ice coffee.<\/p>\n<p>You don&#8217;t think of McDonalds as a company which would engage in guerilla marketing but they are &#8211; and when you consider they are the underdog to Starbucks, it explains the move.<\/p>\n<p>What can we learn from this? Well that sometimes giving things away for free in the beginning of a relationship can be the key to long-term customer acquisition.<\/p>\n<p>Certainly Digium realizes this and so do many other open-source companies. Is it time to explore a way to do this in your business? Maybe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am sitting here at the DFW airport, looking forward to getting home but not thrilled about the 50 degree temperature drop I will be experiencing. While at the food court furiously checking email and blogging, a McDonald&#8217;s representative walked around with free samples of ice coffee. You don&#8217;t think of McDonalds as a company<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[215,198,118],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}