Sampling & Demonstration Introduction

Welcome,  to your
Sampling and Demonstrations Course!

If you think about it, we bet you’ll be surprised at how often you end up buying something as the result of sampling or trying it before you made the purchase. And, how often that purchase was unplanned because of something delicious.

Trial Drives Sales. Period.

Trial drives purchase. It is that simple. Sampling and demonstrations create trial opportunity. The activities in this Guide will help you Drive Trial and Build Awareness.

How Trial Helps

People can be set in their ways.

Especially when it comes to what they prefer to eat and drink. Yes, some are adventurous, but many people limit themselves by sticking to what they know they like – often not giving new or different foods a try.

People avoid risk.

Who wants to invest money and time to be disappointed that the product doesn’t work the way we’d like? Or, ruin dinner by ordering something we don’t like?

People can be indecisive.

The mall food court offers 20 different meal choices. A taste of your featured product could be all it takes to let customer tastebuds select today’s lunch.

Finally…

Trial increases purchase amounts.

A customer visits an electronic store to buy a pair of headphones they read about online, priced at $55 for the pair. But, you have a listening station with a range of headphones in your store. After trying on a few pairs, the customer realizes how much better the $99 headphones sound and perform and buys those instead. You’ve just increased the purchase amount by $44 or 72%.

Knowing these things, and the success we’ve seen in the past, we’ve put this Guide together to allow you to perform the most effective sampling and demonstration tactics possible.

Sampling & Demonstrations

One of the most effective ways to drive trial is through Sampling & Demonstrations.

Simply put, to Sample and Demonstrate is providing free (or reduced price), typically bite-sized offerings of your product. It could be a slider-sized version of your burger, a 3-oz. sample of a beverage, a single-serving of your gum, laundry soap, tea, chips, etc. Enough product to allow the customer to try before they buy.

Getting Started

We’ve divided this Guide into two parts:

• Trial through Sampling – When you offer “bite-sized” trial version of food or beverage type products to your potential customers.
• Trial through Demonstrations – Allows you to provide a mini-experience surrounding your products. For example, to “test drive” a stereo, camera, blender, or fitness tool. We also include trial memberships and introductory/starter sessions in this section. Demonstrations are for things that are better understood through experience.

Another great way to drive trial is through incentives – special offers and coupons – but we’re going to save that topic for another Guide. This Guide is dedicated to sampling and test driving products before you buy.