A Free Prize is not about huge budgets for advertising and research and development. Seth Godin tells us that it’s too risky to spend huge on advertising because the return on ad spend does not justify the investment. Similarly, Seth Godin tells us that spending huge on research and development to come up with a revolutionary product is also risky. However, these two strategies were standard practice not that long ago. Seth Godin tells us that there’s a better way, a more profitable and less risky way: The Free Prize.

We make the Free Prize something Seth calls “Soft Innovation.” Soft innovation is about finding small changes to your product or service that will make it interesting. A soft innovation is a clever and inexpensive iteration of an existing product or service. It’s the type of thing that, if it catches on, and if the consumers want it, it becomes a free prize.

A Free Prize is a remarkable feature about your product or service that people want to talk about. A Free Prize is not about what people need; it’s about what people want. In other words, it doesn’t deliver more of what the consumer buys; it delivers something extra.

A free prize makes an ordinary product a remarkable product. A free prize turns a normal cow into a purple cow. And that, my friends, is why Seth Godin wrote Free Prize Inside, to teach us how to make a Purple Cow.