The Goodie Bag is an ideal vehicle for low cost sampling to a captive and highly targeted market segment, viz., sports events. The Goodie Bag not only provides a perceived value to sports participants receiving the bag, it also provides marketers with direct feedback concerning their sampled products or promotional material.

A Goodie Bag is a bag containing various product samples that the organisers of a sporting event think might appeal to the participants in the event. Apart from samples, it usually also includes useful items such as peaks and water bottles, and some pamphlets or other advertising material. The Goodie Bag has become such an important item in sporting events that most participants think they are paying for it as part of their entrance fee. Some examples of Goodie Bags are shown on the right of this page.

The life-cycle of a typical product sample is shown in the diagram below, from the time it leaves the sample producer to the time the consumer is buying more of the product in her favourite store.

Other benefits of the Goodie Bag include:

• Captive audiences at sports events
• Regarded as an item of value by participants
• Sports events add credibility to the products
• Increases loyalty toward product
• Participants will support the product if given an opportunity to try it
• Ideal vehicle for new product launches
• Market segmentation according to events
• Flexible sampling quantities and sizes

In contrast to the enormous costs and media spend usually required to launch new products into the market, the Goodie Bag provides an easy and relatively cheap means to successfully launch new products and maintain market share in a highly competitive market.