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on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 and is filed under Business.
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Free IPhone? Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. It’s easy to do, legal and when you look at the reasoning behind it, it actually makes sense. Yeah yeah yeah! So where’s the catch?
The new type of marketing where you get paid rather than the press
I’ve just discovered this system while looking on the web. I guess I was a sceptic before, so I’ve probably overlooked it, or dismissed it as a scam, but referral marketing promises big, while also delivering ‘the goods’. There are numerous sites out there who offer free iPhones, HDTVs, Amazon vouchers and the like, and all you have to do is to sign up on the site, take out one of their listed promotions, some of which are free, and then get a number of your friends to do the same. Each time one of your friends signs up to the website and purchases one of their promotions, you get a referral which counts towards your total.
Your gift is worth a certain number of referrals to the website (in the case of the UK, USA and Canada, kudosnetwork, but there are others), so an iPod nano 8GB is worth 6 referrals, an iPhone 3GS, 22. As the value of the item goes up, so does the number of referrals required. Makes sense really, especially when you consider that 22 referrers times 22 referrals means an awful lot of customers (484 actually)
Whereas before companies would spend lots of money on expensive adverts, now they give the money to so called ‘viral marketing’ firms to promote their products, and you and I are doing the work and getting paid instead. Except we’re being paid in TVs, Ipods, Nintendo Wiis and the like.
I mean lets look at the fiercely competitive mobile phone contracts market. In order to incentivise people taking out new contracts (which are worth a considerable amount) for 18 months, all sorts of things are being thrown into the pot to make you bite. HDTVs, IPods, money off vouchers.
So does everyone who signs up to these deals stay there? Well no. But the business model is based on a certain number staying signed up. And the law of averages says that if 484 people sign up to a promotional direct debit, 15% might forget to cancel, thereby giving the company 72 paying customers. This is where the money for your free iPhone comes from. So you don’t get something for nothing, but if you have enough friends and can persuade them to get involved, you’ll be the best tech’ed kids on the block.
