Kidnap marketing

one interesting way of selling is - you do the work for free but hold on to the results until the customer has paid you. like you're kidnapping their work and seeking a "ransom"

Back in 2016, when my daughter was born, there used to exist a photography company called Meri Yaadein. I’m sure the company is older than that - I remember someone going there to get photos clicked back in 2010.

In any case, in 2016, they had set up a booth at Cloud Nine, the hospital where my daughter was born, and had an interesting mode of selling their photography services. A day after the baby was born, a photographer would duly turn up at your room, offering to photograph your baby. He would spend some 30-45 minutes with the baby and its family, taking lots of photos.

From what I remember, the photographer was highly skilled at both handling babies and taking photos. The session went well. And then, a few hours later, the photographer’s accomplice landed up at our room with an iPad, showing photos that had been taken.

Now the catch here is that while the photos had been captured, we didn’t have access to it - we needed to pay before we would be given (both soft and hard) copies of a selected number of photos. We had possibly paid some ₹5000 for 10 photos (all of which are excellent!).

I called this “kidnap marketing”. It was as if the photographer from Meri Yaadein had “kidnapped” photos of our then infant daughter by capturing them on his camera, and then demanded his ransom fees to share the photos with us.

For the photographer, the upside of this was that they could showcase their work before we paid for it - so we knew exactly what we were paying for. This was useful, since most new parents wouldn’t know what infant photos entailed.

The downside, of course, was wasted effort - in the off chance that we did not buy any photos, the hour the photographer spent (and more, spent in editing) was wasted. However, I assume Meri Yaadein had done their maths on this, in terms of the cost of the wastage.

Or maybe not. By the time my son was born in 2023 in the same hospital, Meri Yaadein had disappeared, to be replaced in the Cloud Nine photo booth by the behemoth GK Vale.

In any case, this hospital marketing wasn’t a one off. I remember salespersons from Meri Yaadein roaming the streets of Jayanagar Shopping Complex offering free photos - the modus operandi was the same - once your photos were taken, you could only get your hands on it once you paid.

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The basics of kidnap marketing are:

1. The kidnapper service provider has the ability to withhold the service until the payment has been made.

2. The business is reasonably high margin (I’d say at least 50% gross margin), since there will be a lot of “wastage” of work done that won’t be paid for. Actually, this works best in places where cost and price are not really related.

3. The value of the service is not apparent until it has been performed. Maybe it’s a market with lots of “lemons”. Maybe service providers here have a credibility crisis. Maybe it’s just a new industry / market / technology where value is hard to communicate. Basically you don’t know the value until you’ve seen it.

4. The customer needs to be willing to “get kidnapped”. For example, if you are taking my child’s photos, I should know that you won’t misuse the photos. So some level of basic vetting - such as Meri Yaadein having a booth at the birthing hospital - is necessary.

Now that I’ve defined this concept, you tell me - what are some potential use cases for this? And assuming you’ve understood this concept, is there something I’m missing? And where else have you seen this?