And now the internet. It’s all free right? No. At the moment it’s the selling of our private information on a scale surpassing anything seen before that is paying for our “free”. Remember condition 57f of the terms and conditions that you quickly scrolled to the end of and accepted?
Paywalls changed the media model. Now newspapers are meant to be prestige products, but feel very much like low-cost promotions of their online sites. Someone needs to get that marketing right.
In digital media, it’s data that is helping the giants monetise and grow on a massive scale. Just take a look at the type of location information Google collects – it’s a marketers dream. At the same time more ads are jumping into our social media feeds.
Those big social media apps and sites that so many of us now deem essential to life on Earth have got us hooked on the free offering, but the social value they provide to us means many of us would potentially pay a nice monthly fee to keep that access alive 24/7.
In 2004 two now very famous marketing academics by the names of Vargo & Lusch wrote a seminal paper arguing essentially we will never own a product but merely lease it. Companies loved this. They have been working to make us accept this concept ever since.
In other words it never was free. That was just the basic value offering you had accepted. It wasn’t meant to last. As they say, all good things come to an end.
The “better value” offering isn’t based on price alone anymore, but more the value that we derive from it in so many ways – be they social, financial, psychologically, or whatever. The experience factor. What you thought was free but now pay extra to have.
Australia Post will by no means be the last company to move down this path. The marketing world of 2014 is destroying old business models without fear or favour. And with that destruction will come changed perceptions of what “free” really is.
Andrew Hughes is a lecturer in marketing at the Australian National University in Canberra. Prior to his academic career, Andrew worked in marketing management and strategy for some of Australia’s biggest organisations in the financial, industrial and services marketing sectors.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
