The challenges of hosting a 'free' event

With high-end, expensive gatherings dominating the spectrum, the UE being free-of-charge is one of it’s main selling points. The event is ‘free’. This makes it tempting for the organizer to brand it as such. However, there are a few challenges when branding an event as ‘free’:

• The price of an event is linked to the perceived quality of the event ahead of time (Peterson, 1970). The lower the price, the lower the perceived quality. This means that a free event is perceived to be of worse quality simply because of prejudice.

“I’m going to some free event this afternoon. It probably won’t be good, but then at least I didn’t pay for it right?”

• Businesses often use ‘free’ events for marketing purposes. These events might not have an entrance fee, but usually have a very commercial intention such as: promotion, advertising or the collection of personal data. This means that people might wonder what the ‘catch’ is when an event is marketed as free. And they might even distrust the event if there seems to be no obvious answer.

An example would be the local gym offering free entry in January. Yes, you got some free workouts. But they got your e-mail, phone number and are able to execute a well-refined marketing strategy including smart emotional manipulation on you that makes many sign up for a year membership they’re not likely to use for more than 2 or 3 months. So was it really free?

• The term ‘free’ has been widely abused for online marketing purposes. It is often used by paid services as a false statement to maliciously attract people. This has created distrust around the term (GK).

“Click here to watch this new movie for FREE!”

• There might be secondary motives for people to organize free events. For example, (religious) beliefs, political views or personal motives. When no other obvious motives are present, people might question the organizers’ secondary motives. For UO, this might be particularly challenging as the organizer has to actually organize the event unconditionally to gain trust. If they are still hosting from personal motives (without making that clear) it will not be possible to remove this layer of distrust.
• Due to a combination of aforementioned patterns, branding an event as ‘free’ will impose selection upon the participants. People with high marketing distrust or high expectations of perceived quality will likely not attend the event.

Keep in mind that an UE does not have any cost. We suggest these potential solutions as to how to brand the unconditional event:

• Brand it as ‘free’. It will be clear that the UE is free while dealing with all the challenges listed above.
• Brand it as ‘free-of-charge’, using a slightly different term which is generally less distrusted but still captures the meaning.
• Brand it with a new term. We suggest unconditionally given for this particular way of handling the cost branding.

References

GK = General Knowledge

Peterson, R. A. (1970). The price-perceived quality relationship: Experimental evidence. Journal of Marketing Research, 7(4), 525-528.