If you haven’t read Seth Godin‘s Free Prize Inside I encourage you to run over to Amazon or your favorite bookseller and pick up a copy.  If you have read it, but it’s been 6 or 7 years, find it and read it again.  I was reminded of Seth’s Free Prize Inside this week when I received my package of Field Notes notebooks from Coudal Partners.  Because Field Notes gets the Free Prize Inside mentality.  They give the little something extra – the surprise and delight – that takes an excellent product and makes it one worth talking about.

See for yourself.  All I ordered were the notebooks.

You can see that in addition to the notebooks I also received a rubber band to bind them all together when open, a pencil, a sticker and a year-long calendar.  All waiting for me without me even suspecting it.  It was a true delight when I opened the package. And their inclusion is what has me writing about Field Notes right now.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a gimmick.  This isn’t the toy in the Happy Meal.  Because it doesn’t matter how good the toy in the Happy Meal is, the food still sucks.  With Field Notes the product itself is excellent.  I knew that going in.  I had read plenty of good things online to know that I wouldn’t be disappointed.  And I wasn’t.  But it was the little something extra that says, “Thanks for your business. We hope you come back,”  that makes it special.

So my question to you is, what’s your free prize inside?  What are you doing to surprise and delight your customers?  Can you find something that will take your product from really good to one worth talking about?  What could you add that would make your experience go from satisfactory to memorable?  And how can we avoid the Happy Meal trap?  How can we create something genuine that doesn’t feel rote, that feels like it truly is a surprise, instead of the fruit basket that every client gets?

One thing is for sure, if you can discover your free prize inside you’ll soon find that more people will be talking about you and the “little something extra”  that puts you above the rest.