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Lead Generation Insight From the Fair

By Michael Stelzner

When you were a kid, did you ever get swindled? “I’ll trade you this big penny for that little dime…”

I went to the fair this weekend with my family—and frankly I was surprised.

I am used to seeing a nice big car with little pads that people fill out to win the car.

Not this year…

Rather, people were all in a frenzy.

There was a big wall of computer monitors and people were taking surveys with touch-screen displays.

They were answering questions such as:

  • What is your household income?
  • How old are you?
  • What is your phone number?
  • Would you buy this type of product?

Why were 20+ people ALWAYS in line in front of these machines?

Because if they completed the digital survey, they got a free pass to come back to the fair over the next 25 days (yeah this is a big city!).

So I had my mom with me and I asked her, “Why did you tell them all of that personal information? You know you will start getting calls and lot’s of junk mail.”

She said, “You know, I probably shouldn’t have. But I saw everyone else doing it and I got some tickets. But I will most likely never use them.”

So it seems, the general population no longer needs the lure of a new car. Rather, all they need is lots of people doing something AND the possible gain of something they find valuable.

Oh and by the way, that ticket is worth $9 and only works if you show photo ID.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under Lead Generation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • That's an instant classic, lol...

    Brian
  • Mike, that's because you're in marketing.
  • Katie and Dianna;

    Thanks for your comments.

    I was very surprised that people were willing to give away their information for such a seemingly low valued item--the option to come back again and blow more cash.

    Needless to say, I did NOT fall into this trap.

    Mike
  • Mike,

    The Boston Globe ran an article over the weekend about the "auction mentality" at eBay. Apparently, people will pay more for an item on eBay than its listed retail price -- not including shipping.

    Amazing.
  • My son is always getting swindled by other kids wanting to trade toys or food. I try to explain it to him, but he does what he wants to without reason. He'll figure that one out soon; hopefully, I'm getting tired of buying those expensive transformers and watching his friends walk out the door with them. Anyways, people seem to do anything as long as others are doing it too, even when it doesn't make sense at all. The funniest is when they give away their personal identity for something free, and it really could be just about anything as long as it appears to be valuable. It's sad, but like it or not, there are far less leaders than followers.

    You could create this online with the obvious tricks such as testimonials. You could put a count on the site for number of visitors or people who purchased/viewed the product. Other than simply stating that the product is your most popular, I can't think of anything else right now. Bestsellers definitely pull in buyers. That's what they're for, right?
  • Ed;

    I think you are onto something.

    Take Amazon book rankings for example OR even reviews.

    I think if people see that many others are talking about something, they might be more inclined to act.

    Mike
  • On a recent trip to Croatia, my wife and I made a lot of purchases based on the bandwagon principle. We figured it was a good way to decide which vendors at markets were the good ones since we had little other information to go on.

    I wonder how one could recreate this bandwagon appeal online where it's harder to tell whether others are interested in the same thing? Do bestsellers lists pull this off?
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