Part II, The Mechanics · Chapter 8

Breakers

Product sampling, free trials and money back guarantees: how to get a stranger to try you

Your first spritz on us

Aperol is a bitter orange aperitif, and the first sip surprises people. That is the whole problem of this chapter in one glass. Somebody who has never had one is being asked to spend money on a drink they may not like, in a category where they already have a favourite, with every reason not to bother sitting in the fridge at home.

Aperol’s answer in Australia has been to give the first one away, and it has done it more than once, in two different shapes. From 1 September to 30 November 2022 the brand gave away 100,000 spritzes in bars, clubs and restaurants: order one, keep the receipt, download an app, photograph the receipt, and a digital card worth up to twenty dollars came back. From early November 2024 to early January 2025 it did it again, this time through BWS: register online, receive a unique barcode on your phone, show it at the counter of a participating store, and walk out with a spritz. The first 35,000 valid claims only, while stocks lasted.

Same promise, two very different promotions, and the difference between them is most of what this chapter has to say. In 2022 the stranger paid first and was refunded later, after an app download and a photo of a receipt. In 2024, as far as the published offer shows, the stranger never paid at all. The moment a Breaker exists to remove, the moment a person who has never tried you has to put money down for something they might not like, had been taken out of the transaction entirely. What was left was a minute of admin before the visit, and a drink.

We do not know how either one performed. Aperol has not published it, and the real scoreboard for both lives in the brand owner’s own sales data, where it belongs. What we can say is that the two shapes are two different tools. The 2024 offer takes the stranger’s risk out of the transaction entirely. The 2022 offer is an older trade tool, the one we call Try Me Free, and it has strengths the free version does not. Knowing when to use which is most of the craft of a Breaker.

Why trial is the hardest job

Chapter 2 called trial the hardest thing in marketing, and it is worth being clear about why before getting to how. The person in the aisle has a favourite for nearly everything they buy, and the favourite has done nothing wrong. Switching asks them to give up something certain for something unknown, to spend real money on a guess, and to risk being disappointed on a Friday night in front of people. None of those is a big risk. All of them are enough.

There is also an uncomfortable piece of research that every Breaker has to answer. In 1994 Andrew Ehrenberg, Kathy Hammond and Gerald Goodhardt studied the sales spikes from price promotions on leading grocery brands and asked a simple question: who were the extra buyers? Almost all of them had bought the brand before. The promotions did not bring in new customers, and when they ended, sales went back to where they had been, with no lasting lift and no change in loyalty.

That paper was about price cuts, not every kind of promotion, and we would not stretch it further than it goes. But the warning carries. A promotion aimed loosely at everyone is collected mostly by the people who already buy you, because they are the ones standing in front of your product. Unless a Breaker is designed for the stranger, the stranger does not turn up and your regulars get a discount. So a Breaker is built backwards from the person who does not buy you yet. Where are they? What stops them? What would make the first one feel safe?

What a Breaker needs from the board

Put the job on the five faders from chapter 6 and the settings are unusually clear.

Friction is the fader a Breaker lives on, and the question is not how much friction there is in total but where it sits. Friction before the decision kills trial. Friction after the decision, once the stranger has the product in hand, costs far less. The Aperol barcode moved the work to before the visit and took the payment out; the Virgin flights in chapter 4 put every gate after the phone was connected. Both put the effort where it could not stop the first step.

Reward for a Breaker is usually the product itself, or money off the first one. The product is its own best argument, if it is good, and nothing else a promotion can offer says as much about it.

Belief has to be certain. A chance to win a holiday is a fine reason for a regular to buy again, and a weak reason for a stranger to try something new, because the stranger is already taking one gamble on the product and does not want a second one on the prize. In chapter 3’s terms, the Breaker is flown for the Accountant. Promo-Monitor, the independent tracker whose liquor study appears in chapters 6 and 7, puts it in one line in its guide to briefs: “A certain reward moves non-buyers more than a chance to win. Delivery is the main risk.” We agree with both halves.

Venue has to be where the stranger is, which is usually not in front of your bay. Aperol’s 2022 offer met people in bars, where a spritz is ordered by the glass and a nervous first-timer risks one drink, not a bottle. The 2024 offer met them in a bottle shop, with the product handed over at the counter.

Liability is capped, almost always. “The first 35,000” is a Breaker’s natural shape: a known cost, a reason to act now, and an honest limit stated up front.

Product sampling: give them the thing

Sampling is the oldest Breaker there is: the cube of cheese on a toothpick, the sachet in the magazine, the can handed out at the station. It works for one reason. The stranger’s doubt is about the product, and the only thing that answers a doubt about the product is the product.

It fails for three reasons, and each one has a design answer. The first is that a free sample is taken by whoever is passing, which in a supermarket means plenty of people who already buy you. The answer is to choose where and to whom: outside the category, at the competitor’s moment, through a registration that asks the one question that matters, which is whether they have bought you before. The second is that a sample with nothing attached is a nice moment that ends at the bin. The answer is a reason to buy the second one, a voucher for the full size or a follow-up to the person who registered, which is where a Harvester can ride along with a Breaker without the stranger noticing, exactly as chapter 2 allows. The third is that a sample of a product that does not win is an efficient way of telling a great many people that it does not win.

Product sampling without giving it away: Try Me Free

There is a version of sampling that hands nothing out at all. Try Me Free asks the shopper to buy the product at full price, in the store, and then claim the purchase price back. Aperol’s 2022 offer was one, with the refund capped. On its face it is a worse deal for the stranger, who still has to put money down first, and in one sense it is. But it does four things a free sample cannot.

The sale goes through the till. The retailer sees a purchase, the brand’s scan data counts it, and the category manager has nothing to object to, which matters on the Venue fader more than most briefs admit. The brand pays only for claims, and not every buyer claims. That gap is the fall-away from chapter 4, and like any well-placed friction it can fund a more generous offer, provided it is priced before launch rather than hoped for afterwards. Every claim arrives with proof of purchase and, with consent, a way to follow up, so a Harvester rides along without the stranger noticing. And the promise of money back carries the stranger past the moment of risk: the work of claiming comes after the decision, where chapter 4 says friction belongs.

What Try Me Free cannot do is keep your regulars out. Anyone holding the offer can buy and claim, and a regular who finds one will. Printed on every pack in the aisle, it is mostly a refund to people who already buy you, which is the Ehrenberg finding wearing a different coat. The answer is not to stop using it but to stop broadcasting it. A Try Me Free offer does not have to sit on the shelf; it can be sent. Unique single-use codes can go to the people who do not buy you: through a retailer’s loyalty program to shoppers who buy the category but not the brand, through a partner’s customer list, in the box of a complementary product, at an event where the brand’s regulars are not the crowd. The terms can limit it to one claim per household and exclude people who have claimed before.

Targeting reduces the leak. It does not seal it, and nobody should promise a client that it will. The question for the brief is how much leak the budget can carry, and the answer is set by how tightly the codes are distributed. The same offer that is a refund to regulars on every pack becomes a genuine Breaker when it is sent only to strangers. Which brings us to a Breaker that worked and a lesson that went wrong.

The Pepsi Challenge, and what Coca-Cola learned from it

In 1975 Pepsi began setting up tables in shopping centres across the United States with two unmarked cups. Passers-by tasted both and said which they preferred. Pepsi’s claim, repeated in its advertising for years, was that more of them picked Pepsi.

As a Breaker it was close to perfect. It went to where the Coke drinker was. It cost the shopper nothing. And it solved the hardest part of trial, which is belief, by letting the shopper prove the point to themselves: nobody had to take Pepsi’s word for anything, because the stranger’s own mouth was the evidence. The brand did not argue. It set up a table and let people find out.

The lesson Coca-Cola drew was the wrong one. If people preferred a sweeter cola in a sip, the reasoning went, make Coke sweeter. New Coke was launched on 23 April 1985, the public reaction was furious, and within three months the original formula was back on shelf as Coca-Cola Classic. The usual reading, and ours, is that a sip is not a can. A taste test measures the first mouthful. People buy a drink for the whole thing, and for everything the name on the can means to them.

For a Breaker the lesson cuts both ways. Trial buys the first purchase and nothing more. The product has to win the second, and so the honest scoreboard for a trial promotion is not how many people tried but how many came back. A Breaker that gets a million first sips and no second purchases has proved something, but not what the brief wanted.

Money back guarantees: take away the risk

Some products cannot be handed out on a toothpick. A mattress, a dishwasher, a skincare routine that takes a month to show anything: the stranger cannot try these first, so the Breaker has to make the purchase itself feel safe. The tool is the guarantee. Pay full price, use it, and if it is not for you, get your money back.

A guarantee moves the Belief fader from the other side. It does not tell the shopper the product is good; it tells them the brand is prepared to bet that it is. That is why its terms matter so much. A guarantee with a short window, a long form and a list of exclusions reads as the opposite of confidence, and a shopper can usually tell from the first paragraph which kind they are looking at. The cost to the brand is the refunds, which the product’s own return history can estimate before launch, and a capped or insured version of the same promise is chapter 7’s “sell the risk” at a smaller scale. Hyundai Assurance, the car you could give back if you lost your job, is the extreme case of the same move.

One caution for Australian briefs. A promotional guarantee sits on top of the consumer guarantees the law already gives every buyer, and it must not suggest that those rights depend on the promotion. Write the money back promise as something extra, because it is.

Referral promotions: borrow a friend’s belief

The strongest belief a stranger has is not in any brand. It is in a friend. A referral promotion uses that, by rewarding an existing customer for bringing in a new one, and the best ones reward both sides so that the friend is sharing something good rather than selling something.

The case everyone in technology cites is Dropbox. In September 2008 the file-storage company had about 100,000 registered users. It began giving extra free storage to both the person who sent an invitation and the friend who accepted it. By January 2010 it had four million users. In a presentation in April 2010, the company’s founder said referrals were driving about 35 per cent of daily sign-ups, that the two-sided reward had “permanently increased signups by 60%”, and that users had sent about 2.8 million invitations in the previous thirty days.

Two things to hold on to, in the spirit of chapter 1. Dropbox’s basic product was free, so those were sign-ups, not sales, and the same slides credit shared folders and other features with another fifth of daily sign-ups. And the figures are the company’s own. But the mechanism is the point, and it travels well beyond software: a reward for bringing a friend works because it moves the hardest fader, belief, using the one source of it a brand cannot buy.

How to measure a trial promotion

Ruling R11 in our office says the job sets the scoreboard, and for a Breaker the scoreboard is narrow and demanding. Not entries. Not claims. Not how many people tried. The number that matters is how many new buyers the promotion brought in, and how many of them bought again at full price.

Neither number lives in the promotion. A claim or a redemption is a purchase the promotion can see, and nothing more; it cannot tell you whether that person was new. The first number lives in the client’s sales data, and in retailer loyalty data where the retailer will share it; some retailers can now report how many buyers in a period were new to a brand. The second number needs time, because a repeat purchase happens weeks later. What a well-built Breaker can do on its own is ask, at registration, whether the person has bought the brand before, and keep a way to reach the people who said no. Self-reported answers are imperfect, and they are still better than knowing nothing about who turned up.

Where this leaves the brief

A trial brief usually arrives as “we want more people to try it”, and the temptation is to reach for the biggest prize the budget allows. This chapter argues for something smaller and harder. Name the stranger: who they are, what they drink or buy now, and where they stand when they decide. Name the risk that stops them, which is almost always money on a guess, effort before the payoff, or a doubt about the product that only the product can answer. Then take that risk out of the transaction: give them the thing, or, where the sale needs to go through the till, send a Try Me Free to the people who do not buy you yet. Cap the cost and say so, and build the bridge to the second purchase before the first one happens.

Aperol in 2024 did nearly all of that in a barcode. The next chapter is about what happens after the stranger has tried you, and has to be given a reason to come back, again and again.