A bad offer... IMO

I often have guys come to me, and when it's time to insert the special offer onto the mailer, hanger, etc, the offer reads something like this... "Get 50% OFF fall clean up, when you sign up for our lawn care program." I ask this... is this guy trying to sell clean up, or sell lawn care programs? The easy answer is both, but i disagree. Now i'm aware that this strategy is used quite often in marketing, but when you really think about it, it very limiting. If you want to sell clean up, give a discount on that. If you want to sell both, give a discount on both. When you walk into a supermarket and are looking around... Generally you will see... "Oreos ON SALE $1.00 OFF" Or "Oreos 2 for $5.00" What it DOESN'T say is... "Buy Oreos(at full price) and get 50% OFF Nutter Butters" What if you don't want Nutter Butters? If Nabisco is trying to sell products, i think most of us would agree, that the discount on Oreos is better than requiring the consumer to buy one, in order to get a discount on the second. Now I know this is just an opinion, and i know some of you are saying, "well when I bought a TV i got a blue ray player for free." And in that case, DIFFERENT story... Let's bring it back to lawn care and the example i said earlier... If you gave the fall cleanup FREE... now 2 scenarios can happen... "We need lawn care, we do our own clean up, but what the hell, it will save us from doing the work this year. Call this guy." or... "Look honey, this is a free fall cleanup if we get lawn care, we were going to get lawn care anyway, we should call these guys." I still think a discount for what you are primarily trying to sell is better, but when a second item is FREE vs a discount, it's more enticing. Many of you know me well, I'm not classically trained in this, but I've seen thousands of ads for lawn care companies through my years, and just based on that alone, I think my opionion has soem value, I'm always learing, and don't calim any of this info will help, but if nothign else, it gets you to think what may or may not be beneficial to you.