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01/31/2011, 11:29 AM
#131
[QUOTE=hparsons;2843738]Sounds like someone has been in the retail business 
Aren't we all "in retail" to the extent that we buy stuff as retail consumers? Pretty easy to think like a consumer if I am a consumer.
Slightly off topic, but a few years back, Nissan offered "Buy a truck, get a car" for a while. I almost bit, but my Envoy was still too new.
Around here they did it with used SUV's when gas prices went crazy a few years ago. Buy a new hybrid, get a used gas guzzler... didn't work that well. But now they are all giving away iPads with car purchases (I saw one dealer do that for just a test drive), and that is workng pretty well. How about buy a webOS phone, get an iPad bundle...?
I'm sort of on the fence on whether or not I think HP is going to offer bundles at the consumer level; however, I fully expect them to do so at the corporate level. Bundling there would get WebOS devices in the hands of a lot of users very quickly.
The do it now with PCs, Printers, Phones, LCD dislays, etc. No reason to think they wont continue that. Buy a webOS phone on contract and get a web printer that you can control from that phone... etc.
More likely to work at retail because at the enterprise level there has to be a 1-1 correlation of purchases. If companies only use networked laser printers, they end up with a pile of free inkjet printers that they can't use. The enterprise bundle would be more like "give AT&T all your corporate cell phone lines and the phones will be free" or every smartphone added to a corporate contract comes wth a free MHS app at no cost...
The other technique that works well - and can almost be considered a loss leader" is to give away what people won't buy along with what they will buy. That's the premise behind carriers subsidizing phones. People will pay for monthly service, but have been less likely to pay many hundreds of dollars for a smartphone. But if it's free or almost free, they will gladly sign away the next year or two. Also works with stuff people don't want... Like buy an EVO and get up to 3 free feature phones for additional lines. Dad gets his smartphone, and they dump the crappy feature phones for him to give to the kids.
At lotus we often bundled less popular software with the titles that were popular. Buy 1-2-3 for Windows, get WordPro and Freelance included for free... etc. When done properly, it really works.
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