When Napster first started enabling the easy download of music over the internet, the music industry thought it had a crime-wave problem. The industry was wrong! It had a marketing problem. It didn't understand the perceived value of recorded music stripped bare. Eventually, up popped a marketing savvy Steve Jobs who created iTunes and still makes a fortune out of downloadable music!
Now for someone who got it right over 130 years before Steve Jobs. In Britain before 1840, if you wanted to send a letter or parcel to someone in another city, you took it to the stagecoach office or the coaching inn, and it went on the next coach to the city you wanted. The recipient either had to be psychic or had to check regularly at all the stagecoach offices and coaching inns in town to see if there was anything for them. If there was, they could pay a carriage fee based precisely on the weight of the letter or parcel and the distance it had travelled, and then take their item away. Or they could decide not to pay and not to even see or collect their item.
“Up popped a marketing savvy chap called Steve Jobs who still
makes a fortune out of it!”
Proving the point that marketing is about far more than just promotion, a marketing savvy man called Rowland Hill thought hard about this and came up with an alternative. He realised that the recipients didn't like paying just to find out whether or not they had been sent junk mail. He concluded that the sender should pay, and that there should be a very simple charging system that didn't charge by the page or penalise people for having friends a long way away.
In Hill's scheme you would take your letter to his coach company's office and pay a standard fee, almost regardless of weight and distance. It still required the recipient to check regularly, but at just one local office, and at least they didn't have to pay to receive a letter. In order to let everybody know that the fee had been paid, Hill came up with an adhesive receipt which could be attached to the letter or parcel. This receipt wasn't personalised - It was the same for everyone. In fact you could even buy these 'receipts' from your local office in advance of writing your letters! Hill called it a "Postage Stamp".
So successful was this idea that it soon caught on around the globe, and because it was so valuable and popular, Hill gained Royal approval for his Mail system. Eventually he could afford to add the extra service of placing a collecting box on every street corner and employing people to empty these boxes and deliver the letters and parcels right to people's houses, which the recipients valued highly too.
If you agree with these thoughts and would like to find out more about pricing your services on the value your customers get out of them so you can make sales without selling and get paid what you're worth, visit www.sws3.co.uk to download 30 more free practical ideas you can implement straight away in your business.
Service providers who charge for their time or their materials, or whose prices are influenced by their competitors can find out how to get paid what they're really worth at www.sws3.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment