Now imagine going to the counter and being told you can’t pay with it because you’re a regular. Not so happy now I’d say. In fact, on the wrong day it could even make you irate.

And yet this is what Google seem to be doing a lot lately with their Adwords vouchers. They are clearly trying to encourage new users by giving vouchers to new accounts, however they are also sending them to a lot of existing customers who then can’t use them (unless you sneakily set up a separate account, but that could also mess with your metrics and analysis).

In the case of your local shop it could be dangerous, because there is generally another shop nearby that you could patronise instead, however in the case of Google Adwords is there any real competition?

Should Google be concerned about the negative emotional fallout from giving unusable vouchers to their customers?

It’s a question that can’t really be answered, but I wonder what the cost / gain there would be to at least having a lesser option for existing customers – instead of simply being told your account is too old to redeem the voucher imagine seeing this message:

Oh dear – we’re sorry but you can’t redeem this voucher, it’s for new users only. We love you too though, because you’ve been a customer since ‹insert date›, so here’s a tenner added to your existing balance

He has now published a book called Free (The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing Is Changing the Face of Business). The book is not free, it’s about €18.99 as pointed out in Malcolm Gladwell’s review of the book.

Gladwell is another thought provoking writer and it is worth reading Anderson’s original article, then read the review and then for laughs read a third thought provoking author’s view on it from Seth Godin.

For the record? All three authors have interesting points to make but (admittedly without having read the book) I like Gladwell’s analysis best.

Books of this type like to put forward black and white theories on how things are, how things will be or how things should be done. Gladwell too may be guilty of this in his own books, but he speaks the truth here:

The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.

There will always be a place for free. But on the internet some tend to assume free is a right, but we should be mindful of being bullied into being free without a solid plan in place to actually generate revenue.

That said, I look forward to reading the book as a thought provoker.