Just Because It’s Free Doesn’t Mean It’s Easy

Street teams are a tried and true promotional tactic; yet in the ad above, Western Union shows us it can be hard to give anything away to strangers on the street — even cold hard cash. But leave it to marketing “amateurs” at the Hope Fellowship Church to come up with a simple but ingenious ploy that I was helpless to resist.

I was approaching the entrance to the T the other day when a woman standing just outside asked me if I’d like a free granola bar. Never one to turn down free food no matter what it is or how recently I’ve eaten, and thinking that this was a sampling promotion, I said sure. So she handed me a plain old Quaker Chewy granola bar. Umm… OK?

But I soon realized that this unassuming woman was in fact a master of sleight of hand, as I discovered under the granola bar in my hand a business-card sized note:

There you have it: Free Food + Soft-sell Message = Everybody Wins. Put another way: you can hand me flyers all day long, as long as there’s a chewy granola bar attached to them.

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