THE PRINCIPLE

Expose people to your products any way you can – if they like it they’ll pay for more

In 1999 Moby’s album Play was not selling well. He licensed all of the album’s 18 tracks for use in commercials, television shows or films – the first time this had been done. People were exposed to the music, liked it, wanted to hear more and ended up buying more than 10 million copies of the album around the world.

Wayne Gould didn’t invent Sudoku, but he did make it popular. Intrigued by a Sudoku book he saw in Tokyo, he wrote a computer program that generated Sudoku puzzles and rated their difficulty. His Pappocom Sudoku puzzles were picked up by more than 400 newspapers internationally. But instead of charging the papers for it, he made it free – as long as the publications promoted his books and computer program. The people who enjoyed doing the puzzles wanted more. Gould sold over 4 million books.

In both these examples the method of distribution became the key to the success of the products. Especially if the traditional ways of distributing your product or service are overcrowded or expensive, consider how you get them to your customers. As shown by Moby and Gould, once you get them hooked, they’ll want more.