Run up for the free prize

At White Wall Web, we’re in the fortunate position to be able to have a large say in the way we develop our products. This isn’t just reserved for the management level; one of the huge benefits of a flat hierarchy like ours is that anyone in the team can have a say.

When I first joined the company, I noticed this incredible opportunity for team members to make a real change in their day-to-day work life. Ideas can be picked up and used immediately and make their own work so much more enjoyable.

However, I noticed that most people never take this up. This isn’t surprising, most jobs require (or even worse, encourage), little or no thought for the employees involved. Move these crates, make these calls, write this software. Just get it done. It was around this time when I started reading about Seth Godin, Marketer extraordinaire and his book Free Prize Inside! I picked this up for R20 and it was the best investment I’ve made in some time.

The premise of the book is this – the old-school methods of attracting new customers free prize cover

no longer apply. Mass advertising of a commodity fails because we get bombarded with advertising constantly. Investing huge amounts in Research & Development to create a new market is a major risk; companies advance and move so quickly that you’ll almost always end up behind – before you know it, your fancy multi-million dollar DRM system has been cracked by a Norwegian teenager and you have to start all over again.

So how do you get the edge in such a fast-flowing market? Godin suggests that it’s the soft-innovations. Those little additions and ideas that can pop-up so frequently during your day-to-day activities. It’s these innovations that make your product stand out and become a Purple Cow (another Godin-ism), something remarkable that stands out from the crowd. They’re called a free prize because the cost of bringing this idea to life is dwarfed by the revenue that it helps to return.

At our last conference, I introduced these concepts and tried to encourage the most important lesson from the book – Championing.

All Free Prizes need a champion. Someone that is responsible for getting the idea to fruition. This requires a large amount of responsibility on the part of the champion to be resilient enough to fight through the right channels to get their idea heard and sold.

We’re working heard to instill these qualities in our teams and to encourage these free prizes that all companies desperately need.

We now hold monthly Innovation sessions, where employees showcase new ideas and concepts to the rest of the company. These pitches open up the eyes and ears of White Wall Web and encourages a staff made up of champions.