What is "vendor" generated worth?

I think the hardest part of the venerable 4 p's of marketing is price. We typically think of price as being the monetary purchase of a company's product(s) and/or service(s), but that isn't always the case. We can also think of price, and we should, as simply what is exchanged for that product, which doesn't have to be a dollar amount at all, but things like time, information, or even actions like clicks. From that perspective when we look at this across the entire buying cycle we see that there is actually a price consideration at every stage, from awareness all the way through, and not just exclusive, to the purchase.

I put this primer in here because I recently came across an article in CMS Watch titled "Software vendors need to understand how the web really works" that says information, specifically from software company's, are uniformly inaccessible based on prospect and customer expectations. In particular he lists his top 5 "rules [that] should be spray-painted above the main entry door of every WCM, ECM, DAM, Web Analytics, or Enterprise Portal vendor's headquarters." Personally I think most of the points made in the article are a little pedestrian, but the one that struck me the most was his number 1..."All links to marketing materials should be direct download links", basically saying that putting a form between a prospect and a whitepaper is bad.

Now there may be a semantic argument to be had here, in terms of what is considered marketing materials, but when considering the tenor of the entire article this is just ridiculous. Why would content generated by a software vendor, be any less valuable than that of a magazine, a newspaper, or in the case of CMS Watch, an independent analyst, that charge for their content? And the hypocrisy is just laughable because if you click any of CMS Watch's Evaluation Reports they require you to fill out a 16 question form to get a free, truncated, sample of the report. A software vendor has just as much of a case to make for "selling" their premium content in exchange for information, or even money, as your subscription to Time Magazine. Believe it or not, software company's often have more experience in their particular space and certainly their specific product, than the average consumer out there, so why wouldn't a how-to video, a best practices whitepaper, or survey results be a fair exchange for some information on that person? Or maybe they should just go to Amazon and purchase a book on the subject instead...oh, wait they're still paying for it.

Apple is a great consumer example of this. Sure there's free music out there, but the quality is inconsistent, viruses are always present, and of course it was/is illegal. Apple introduced iTunes to take advantage of this opportunity to put a price on a perceived value of quality and consistency and now they are the largest music retailer, outselling Walmart. Social media is even starting to get in on the game and trying to figure out how to monetize their sites and services...Twitter even recently announced it may start charging companies for commercial use, of course the question then becomes, what's a company?

The moral here is if you're offering value there is no reason that you shouldn't charge a price for it. Back to our buying cycle, this is also applicable in demand generation and lead nurturing for pushing your prospects from one stage to another by offering valuable information, whitepapers, demos, trials, POC's or consulting in exchange for something from your prospect. If Google has taught us anything, it's that nothing is really free.

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