Show users the love with an easy tee
// May 15th, 2009 // Advertising
The Polar Rose Product Team in their T-Shirts
It’s hard to find something that rewards a global audience and as a startup it can be difficult to find something with sufficient universal appeal, low unit cost and easy shippability to, say, reward beta testers for their hard work.
Behavioural economics teaches us that virtual value (such as a free month’s site hosting extension) has nothing like the emotional impact of a real, physical gift.
Is there such a thing as a universal-appeal, low-cost, easy-shipping customer gift for startups? Absolutely, and smart startups have known this from the beginning of the software industry: tee shirts.
Travel to the farthest corner of the world and the tee shirt is the most pervasively distributed element of western culture. Well, other than carbonated drinks and cigarettes but those are (a) addictive; and (b) advertised heavily.
Tees ship easily (light weight, roll-up tight, hard to damage) and in large quantities, they can be surprisingly cheap. If you’re clever, they can carry a great brand marketing payload.
Just today the Polar Rose team in Malmo, Sweden, emailed beta testers to thank them for their efforts, let them know about some product news, and ask for their postal address so Polar Rose could send them a great tee shirt design.
The design’s not perfect (I think a smaller message on the back would get more wear out of the tee) but it’s a cool logo and where I come from, brown is totally the new black. Nice work Polar Rose! (And yeah, I’m hoping to get a tee. But I’ve been testing too!)
