Companies have been sampling products to their potential customers for ever. When you can give them a nibble of your product or service and add to that a sense of urgency, you may be on to something.
Recently, Adobe released public preview versions of some of their upcoming programs that will be available in the Creative Suite 4 (CS4).
That they released preview versions of their software isn’t all that new … but the time-limit they put on the installed preview, before the program is disabled is quite surprising … two days!
With the standard software trial period being 30 days, or in some cases unlimited time - limited features, Adobe has played a unique hand that has many people in the graphic community scratching their heads; why offer a trial of their software that only lasts two days?
Exclusivity and Urgency
When google first released Gmail, they made it available to only a select few. Those that got an account were given a handful of invites to give out to their friends. You started with one invite and a little message above your invites indicated that you would get more eventually.
This limited supply caused the invites to be cherished like gold; you only gave them out sparingly. It also created an automatic digital divide between those that had, and those that had not. There was a sense of pride in the fact that you got a Gmail account and that through your mercy, you could freely share this rare resource with those you liked the most.
The demand and short supply fueled the social media fires; the word that Gmail was out became very viral.
Adobe has provided fuel for a similar type of fire by allowing a very short window of time to preview their apps. There is also a sense of hiearchy being built between those with registered copies of CS3 ( wo can enter in their CS3 serial numbers and keep the CS4 versions alive, and those who don’t have CS3.
Two days is a very narrow window to dig into a program, but the hope that it will generate some buzz, a sense of demand for the new features and more peviews to come seems to be working. The graphic community has brought it upon themselves to blaze, like Paul Revere, through every graphic forum, user group and chat room to announce that the betas are available.
