We all like something for nothing.
But haven’t we all heard the adage – attributed to Napoleon Hill – that there is no such thing?
The problem with ‘free’ is, well, that it’s rarely truly free.
Why?
Because there is no value in free.
This is known as the Common Law of Business Balance, often articulated in this quote attributed to 19th-century writer, art critic and social thinker, John Ruskin:
It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot – it can’t be done.
If ever we need a neat demonstration of this in the world of marketing, we only need to look to Facebook’s organic reach stats...…
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