Free Prize Inside!: How to Make a Purple Cow

Every one of his books, blog posts, articles, speeches, etc, are top notch. This book is no exception.

This book has some very snazzy packaging and you can even get it inside a cereal box. Seth Godin knows how to get people's attention and mine was fully captivated as I devoured this book. Free Prize is full of Seth's musings on how to create "soft innovations" within an organisation. A soft innovation being a "clever, insightful, useful small idea that just about anyone in an organisation can think up". If you want a book to get you thinking outside the (cereal) box and to get your brain on a different planet where those cool things you and your friends talk about may actually one day be dreamed up by you - this is the book. As I was reading it I was constantly bugging my family with snippets from it like the idea he had for randomly putting $100's in the $20 slot of an ATM as a promotional idea or the gardening company who provided quotes from satellite photographs and sent them out on frisbees.

Awesome book. Seth's "BIG FRONT FOUR" (my name for four key excerpts that knocked me for a loop)... "Focus on the unsatisfied." "Make An Invisible Service Visible." "The free prize transcends the utility of the original idea." "When you identify what's broken among your competitors, you've found a free prize." ... caused us to find our product's "Secret Prize." We implemented a program within 5 days that has so far caused sales to jump by 50%. Tremendous feedback from inbound e-mail corroborates that we're on the right track, as does the fact that existing customers identify strongly with this "core" messaging. I've read all of Seth Godin's books. This one is his best. Ken Evoy President, SiteSell.com htttp://www.sitesell.com/

Remember back in the day when every cereal came with a "Free Prize Inside?" Maybe it was a toy, a game, or maybe even a bowl. You (or possibly your kids) would stand in the cereal aisle at the market, and your choice of what to buy would depend more on what the prize was than the cereal, because the cereals were pretty much all the same: wheat or corn, sugar, possibly pretty colors or a cartoon mascot. Well, in Seth Godin's fantastic follow-up to "Purple Cow" (another must-read), he contends that the business world today is much like that cereal aisle... companies are offering very similar products and services, and the differentiation comes from offering their own form of a free prize. Godin first explains what a free prize is, he then tells how to sell your great idea to your colleagues, and then he focuses on what you can do (edgecrafting- read the book to learn more about this awesome idea) to create a free prize. Nevermind that his ideas are fantastic, Godin is one of the best business writers out there. His books always offer really interesting examples of companies who have demonstrated some of the ideas he offers, and his books are so fun to read that you will find yourself laughing and sharing some of his stories with your colleagues and friends. BUY THIS BOOK!

Free Prize is what I see as the related follow-up to Seth's powerful last book Purple Cow. These two books together serve as my small company's product development / product innovation department. Free Prize has 3 distinct elements that make it worth the buy:1) The whole 2nd section on how to champion your idea. This is invaluable. This section shows the reader how to get team/corporate adoption once you develop a product/service innovation. This section is worth the value of the whole book.2) The concept of Edgecrafting. This is suppose to be an alternative to Brainstorming. This is a powerful concept. Everyone likes to Brainstorm, but how many real products or services come from a generic Brainstormin session. Plus how often can an operational company really brainstorm? The concept of Edgecrafting is one that can be done on a daily basis. Seth teaches the reader how to go to the edge (he gives examples of edges) and shows you how to innovate from their.3)The endnote section. Seth includes an extensive list of references, websites, and various endnotes for further exploration. Once again, just reading and researching the various endnotes could give you ancillary reading material for the next year!I love it. I still put Permission Marketing and IdeaVirus (these are books about business models - you can build a business around these concepts!) as Seth's best books, but Free Prize comes in right after those two.