Remember the movie Miracle on 34th St? For those of you who live under a rock the movie is about a little girl and her mother meeting the real Santa Claus. Santa for reasons still somewhat unclear went to work at Macy’s during his short offseason between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and did something crazy, he told customers where they could find specific toys for their kids at the competition. At first Mr. Macy was beside himself until he realized that the method built life long customers out of those who heard about it. In the movie the idea was more about the Christmas spirit than smart advertising, but in reality this method works really well. Take for example Progressive insurance who shows customers competitive pricing, before doing so they had annual sales of $3.4 billion and since implementing this tactic now have annual sales of $15 billion. Amazon uses similar tactics, that’s why they sell advertising to their competition. [1] In our industry even VMware uses this technique in vCAC integrated ITBM to show you what your cloud costs would be for AWS, Azure and vCHS.