10 Things We Have Learned From Apple & U2

For several years, brands have provided people with things for free, incentives, gifts with purchase, and all manner of 'surprise and delight' offerings to make people happy. Now it seems, consumers aren't happy when they get something for nothing. As one commentator remarked on Twitter: "We are now scraping the bottom of the barrel of first-world problems."

While brands will certainly learn from the Apple/U2 incident, I think we could all personally learn something to help avoid a similar calamity in our private lives:

1. If you go to a birthday party, you must give the birthday boy/girl the option to NOT accept your gift BEFORE you give them your gift.

2. If you deposit money into someone else's bank account without warning, they will get upset and demand you supply them with a method to remove the free money.

3. If a Chinese restaurant give customers a free bag of prawn crackers with every order over £20, they must only give the prawn crackers to people who previously purchased prawn crackers and liked the prawn crackers. Liking something similar to prawn crackers, such as prawn toast, does not qualify them to receive free prawn crackers.

4. If a waiter fills a customer’s wine glass above the little white line on the side, the customer will shout their displeasure to all the other customers and make a fuss until the waiter drinks the wine back down to the little white line on the side, then the customer will resume drinking their wine while constantly grumbling about the incident in which they nearly got some extra wine for free and it almost destroyed the valuable collection of wine they already had in their wine glass.

5. If a company gives their employees a Christmas bonus, the employees will vocally discredit that company on social media and threaten to resign unless the company takes back the Christmas bonus.

6. If a cereal company includes a little toy in every box of cereal, consumers will tell everyone they know, and many people they don’t know, how much they hate that toy and never wanted that toy.

7. If an airline gives a passenger a free flight to New York, the passenger will be enraged because they have always paid for their flights with their own money. And they prefer Bali.

8. If a magazine includes a free sachet of shampoo, the customer who purchased the magazine will demand the magazine publisher comes to their house and removes the utterly offensive free sample from their pristine collection of magazine pages, even if they have used the free sample of shampoo, quite liked it but pretended they didn't.

9. If a hotel leaves a chocolate on a guest’s pillow, the guest will be furious at having a chocolate foist upon them without consent and storm from the hotel making a loud scene.

10. If a dentist gives a lollipop to a child for being good, the child will throw itself on the ground in a tantrum because they went to the dentist to get pain and suffering, not to endure the terrible misfortune of receiving a free lollipop.