Good Christmas Marketing
Saturday, December 15, 2007 1:14PM PST — Permalink
Like most internet-savvy people today, I do most of my Christmas shopping online. Because of this, there's been a steady trickle of packages showing up on our doorstep for the past few weeks. What threw me off today was that I received a package from Amazon this morning. Why it was strange was that I wasn't expecting any packages from them, but I just chalked it up to ordering something and forgetting about it.
So I scooped up the package and took it to the back of the house to open, just to be sure I didn't ruin someone's surprise. Well, it turns out the surprise was for me. The book was 'The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0', which was a book I had placed on my Amazon wishlist. All became clear when I read the note on the invoice.
Merry Christmas from the Adobe Flex Team! We noticed you added this to your Amazon Wishlist. Hope you enjoy this gift from Adobe! From: Mike Potter, Flex Team, mpotter@adobe.com
Needless to say I was very pleased to see this, and I'll be sending a 'thank you' to Mike, but I also immediately thought, "what a really great way to do gorilla marketing". Step into Adobe's shoes for a second. You have this really great new technology that could easily be the 'next big thing' in web development, but the only thing holding you back is widespread adoption. So how do you get adoption? You court the developers. You go out and find the developers that have an interest in this stuff (like those that add reference books to their Amazon wishlists) and you help provide tools so they can build more and better web applications using your technology. At the same time you're rewarding them with a gift that breeds company and brand loyalty.
The funny thing is that I know this is exactly what Adobe did, yet it doesn't matter. I'm still very excited, I'm still going to go develop new things in Flex because of this, and I'm still very thankful to Adobe for doing such a nice thing. Wow, who new marketing could be so fulfilling and not leave you feeling slimy all over? Thanks Adobe!
