Free product samples can be an amazing form of publicity for a given company. They alert potential customers to the existence of a new product or they remind them about an older product that has recently been reformulated and repackaged. In that way they get the word out. But free product samples are actually so much more than publicity. You see, standard forms of publicity such as advertisements ask the viewer or listener to take a non-neutral party’s word for it that a product is excellent or works well. This neutral party tends to be a paid actor or a company executive, so getting his or her income is contingent on making a convincing case for buying the product. Free product samples work differently. The people who receive the free products are not paid by the companies to receive them. So when they go out into the world and share their experiences with other people, there is no monetary motivation for them. There’s nobody to monitor them and make sure they stick to the script and give the product a glowing review or testimonial. So their praise or criticism comes from the heart.

This is exactly what manufacturers are relying on when they give out free product samples. First of all, they must believe in the superior quality of their products. Otherwise, they wouldn’t feel sure about getting positive reviews of them. Secondly, they know that word of mouth, which travels through the grassroots, is the most effective way to get information out to genuine customers. If the manufacturers have done their homework well, then the people who receive the free samples will most likely be the ones who will buy them. Additionally, these prospective customers are bound to talk to people who share their tastes in product samples. In this sense, when done well, giving free product samples to potential customers can be one of the most effective instances of niche marketing.

Sometimes these potential customers join discussion forums and discuss their experiences with the other members of the forums. They write reviews of and opinions about the products and post them online, where a large audience has access to them. At this point, anybody who plugs the right keywords into a search engine can have access to all of this information. This achieves even greater outreach than word of mouth does on the issue of free product samples.