Every time I pass a Public Storage facility, I’m reminded of their brilliant marketing and pricing strategy of offering the first month of storage for $1. The effectiveness of this strategy is subtle, but ingenious. Rather than offering the first month of storage for free, they put a tangible (albeit small) price on a service that few people know the price of. I, for one, had no idea how much monthly storage facilities cost. For years, I thought the industry standard cost of a month’s worth of rent for storage space was around $1. It wasn’t until I actually looked into storage facilities and started comparing prices did I realize that the $1 was far from the truth.
If Public Storage had offered the first month for free, I (and I imagine most other people) would have saw right through the marketing and become dubious of the pricing, chalking the costs up to something higher than what I would expect. However, since I (and I’m willing to bet most people) was not familiar with the storage market, the tangible cost of a dollar seemed much more real and believable. Here is a rare, non-Perl, non-shell-script example where $0 > $1 is true.
Even though I now know better, I still associate Public Storage as that orange storage company with affordable storage costs of only a buck. Now that is good marketing.
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