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Comment by jbarciauskas | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a $1.6 million unplanned marketing event. I'd bet it pays off better than $1.6 million in traditional advertising.

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Not really. A bunch of people got great deals but the blog post is from two days ago and I've yet to see any coverage in traditional media outlets. It seems like $1.6 million can buy much better exposure.

Two days ago was a Friday, I think it's a little early to judge the outcome of this.

I had not even heard of the site before it was posted here. I'm almost ready to check out with a decent order.

No question that 1.6MM could definitely buy much more exposure (the end goal of this exposure being customer acquisition and sales). Don't get me wrong, they did the right thing--however, this is no "happy accident".

Yep - we did a Zappos tour last week and judging from their culture they would view this as a great marketing expense in addition to "the right thing to do".

Also it's not fair to judge it by major media exposure because:

1. The people who got those deals will generate word of mouth

2. If they hadn't honored it it would have generated negative word of mouth

Gotta factor those two in.

Yes, but word of mouth is incredibly hard to measure. (twitter and social media helps a bit in this regard) What you can measure is broad media exposure, so this is what you look at as a measure.

The most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable,... but successful management must nevertheless take account of them. (W. Edwards Deming quoting Lloyd Nelson)

could it have been an intentionally planned ... mistake?

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