Does your service or product have a free prize inside? 

Tazo's, as explained by Wikipedia, are round or octagonal disks which can be found inside a bag of Frito Lay chips.  The object of the tazo is each one has a score, and players can play each other to win, trade them, or collect the tazos. In Mexico, tazo's are very popular with the school children. How do I know this? Because both of my sons are completely obsessed with collecting these round seemingly worthless pieces of plastic. So much so, that my youngest son will collect money for weeks, and then when he is allowed, go to the local store and buy as many small bags of chips which are so marked as having a tazo inside as he can afford. Once he has them, he'll proceed to open the bags, pretend to eat some of the chips just to access the tazo. When I noticed this, I couldn't help but be impressed by this marketing. Each bag of chips by Frito Lays in Mexico costs between 6 and 8MXN pesos, nearly half of $1 USD. The tazo itself is likely close to nothing if it's mass produced but is the item most valued in the bag by him, and the other children I see playing with them on almost every street corner. My son told me of a child in his class that collected the tazos and had nearly 100. Wikipedia tells of a person that's been collecting tazos for 20 years, and has nearly 2M of them. Excuse me? 2 Million pieces of plastic, a life's work? 

The concept of having a free prize inside is not new. Seth Godin wrote a marketing book called Free Prize Inside which spoke of the importance during the early days of Internet marketing of the benefits on offering something for free inside your web service or product. A few of the more famous companies that also employ(ed) this strategy successfully are Cracker Jack popcorn, and the British Christmas Cracker which contain a paper crown, riddle, and a prize inside. As a Christmas tradition in our house, recently we remarked at how much of a success these crackers provided at a recent Christmas celebration as we each read each other's jokes, and played with the toys or prize that came inside. These prizes entertained our table for at least half of the meal. 

What does all of this have to do with hotel Internet, and being a hotelier in Mexico? Well, our company has a few prizes we're developing and currently strengthening for 2012, and it relates to the concept of having a free prize inside. After building our social media presence and educating ourselves on some of the more prominent social media platforms, I was surprised at the amount of tweets and noise being made by upset hotel guests at either the speed, or the lack of service when it came to hotel Internet. It's no secret that Internet may become as important, or even more important than having lights inside the hotel. Guests simply expect to have Internet and that it be as good as it is in their homes. As devices like the iPad come out, and people start traveling with 2 or 3 devices that need to be connected, the demand for top tier Internet equipment, and more particularly service, become more essential.

It's not enough for an Internet provider such as ourselves to provide the best commercial equipment, or to even back it up with excellent 24x7 bi-lingual support. We need to have a tazo inside, and that's the part we're working on. We have a number of included services including our iGemm Hotel application, our iPad rental solutions, and managing our support center to offer it as a stand alone service. For 2012, we'll be working on these tazo services, strengthening them, and focusing on how to make them so appealing that the hotelier will be buying into our services just to get that precious tazo.

Does your hotel have a tazo inside? Will you be working on making it more desirable in the upcoming year? Leave us a comment, we'd love to hear about your ideas.