Does "Limited Time" make sense in Internet Economies
I normally use Firefox, but this morning I had to visit a website that doesn’t play nice with my browser of choice and so fired up IE6. Thus, I was “treated” to a rare visit to the IE6 default homepage, msn.com. As it so happened, they were advertising a limited time (today only) “Live Preview of Microsoft Office 2007.”
My annoyance at the ad only started with the fact that it practically hung my browser with an out of memory error, although I’m sure that can’t be Microsoft’s fault, can it? I also wondered about the wisdom of “Today Only” events in the Internet economy–especially “Today Only” marketing efforts.
Special promotions run by traditional brick and mortar stores take a lot of effort, not only to produce, but to run as well. You have to train staff on the special, they have to focus on directing people towards the special and then up-selling them on various money-making add-ons.
None of that applies to Internet marketing. Almost all of the economic cost associated with the marketing campaign is production. In the case of the Microsoft Office Live Preview, it requires programming efforts, branding efforts, promotional efforts, server deployment and provisioning, and so forth. Once its deployed, it is pretty much free–some occasional maintenance (or not so occasional–this is Windows, after all), some minor costs in bandwidth, and so forth. Sure, they may not want to waste headline space on MSN.com. But, the overall question is this: Does Microsoft gain anything by denying me a Live Preview tomorrow if I decide to try out this “Office 2007″ stuff. This is a marketing effort, after all, and not a sales effort–they don’t cannibalize potential revenue by extending a promotion.
I recently picked up on a good Seth Godin presentation on his blog describing the shift in the economy (my analysis, not his) from a producer-push economy to a consumer-pull. Given that Microsoft is asking consumers to spend some of their time playing with their product so that they will be so overawed by an office program that they’ll decide to fork out another $300 dollars, the least Microsoft can do is give them a window that can work with my schedule.