A few months back I volunteered for the Seattle Heart Walk down at Seahawks Stadium. The walk is a huge event with thousands of walkers shuffling their way through Seattle's dreary weather to raise money for heart disease awareness and treatment.

It's also an absolutely tremendous mess.

You see, on the way into to the stadium all the walkers were offered FREE bottles of juice and sugar free soda.

Now, in the right context, FREE can be a pretty powerful incentive. Giving away a FREE gift with purchase or offering a FREE half hour consultation (a $200 value!) can light a real fire under your sales.

But in the wrong context? In a valueless context? Well. . .

One of my jobs as fluorescent-green-shirted volunteer was to keep an eye on the trash. So, when the walkers went on their. . . uh. . .walk, I went out and scanned the field for left behind garbage.

And what do you think I found?

You got it, hundreds of FREE bottles of juice and sugar-free soda. Now, empty bottles, I expected (though seeing all these good hearted folks lazily leaving their trash behind did irk my inner environmentalist.) What really struck me was how many of the left behind bottles of juice and sugar free soda were 80%, 90% or 100% full. Some - dozens and dozens, I'd say - hadn't been opened at all. The seal hadn't even been broken. They'd just been picked up on the way in and left behind on the way out. What would cost $1.50 in the store, was absolute trash in the stadium.

Huh.

"So," you might be thinking, "What are we, the reading and marketing public, supposed to learn about price, perception, want and value from this startling display of human largesse?"

I'm so very, very glad you asked. For this one, we're going to have to resort to bullet points:

1. Consumers sometimes equate FREE with Worthless. If you give something away that people don't really want then they won't value it. Offer me a free iPod and I'll love it. Offer me a free haircut (I'm bald) and I'll give you a withering look. A lot of the heart walkers didn't really want bottles of juice or sugar- free soda, they just took them because they were offered or -- this being Seattle -- because they didn't want to be rude.

2. Consumers sometimes equate EXPENSIVE with Valuable. Ever buy soda and popcorn at the movie theatre? Let me guess, you drink ever drop of that $5 soda and scarf down every last kernel of that $6 bucket of popcorn.

Me too. And if I pay someone a big chunk of change for advice? You bet your bucket that I pay attention and get the most I can out of those honeyed words.

3. Price is a feature. Why do people buy $35,000.00 cars? Because they cost $35,000.00. No, really, I mean it. If BMW suddenly started offering it's high end models for $10,000.00 and a bag of chips, BMW's target market (the well heeled and wealthy - or those who wish they were well heeled and wealthy) would buy fewer, not more, of their cars.

If you're aiming at the bottom of the market, then a low price is a feature. If you're aiming at the high end of a market, then you NEED to charge a lot. If you're somewhere in the middle? You'd better have a solid, respectable price. And if you're running a service business, charging too little will cost you more than money, it'll cost you customer respect.

"Wait," you might grumble. "Are you saying that we should never give anything away for free?"

Not at all. I'm just saying that you need to do the tough work of establishing VALUE for your products and services first, and that when you do give something away for free you make sure:

1. It's something your target market wants.
2. That your audience knows without a doubt what kind of deal it's getting and how valuable your product or service really and normally is.

Cover these two bases and you can feel free to FREE away.

Whew. Isn't it amazing what you can learn picking up other people's trash?

Chris Haddad is a copywriter and marketing wonk living and working in Seattle, Washington. Chris specializes in using rhythmic, conversational copy to break down the final barrier between company and customer and to turn one-time buyers into highly loyal, high spending friends.