Power of marketing: Selling free goods at a premium price

One of the best marketing concepts is bottled water.
1) One takes something which is basically free: water from a spring
2) Have a minimal process: verify the quality – maybe filter it
3) Package it: in a bottle
4) Brand it: Vittel, Evian , Volvic, Perrier
5) Marketing the benefit: using advertising campaigns like “Good for your health”, “Revitalizing”, “Brings youth to your body/life” and “Cleanness/Purity” or just “Cool”.
6) Then sell it for a premium price over tap water.

Compared to tap or municipal water, which can be consumed in most places in developed countries without any problem, the bottled water is many times more expensive.
This is great marketing “invented” by mainly French companies and the health benefit is not proven for all waters.

Moreover one needs to go the grocery store, supermarket or hypermarket in order to purchase the bottled water, whereas the tap water is available in house. Thus people make an effort to get this bottled water: being healthy or cool is important.

In many developed countries, the regulations governing tap water quality, monitoring, and regulation are more stringent than those for bottled water. Thus the consumer pays a premium price for a product with less frequent and strict monitoring.

Origin:
It all started in the nineteenth century in France and Belgium (Spa) with spring water, where people came to these cure and spa resorts for health reasons (and drinking problems).

Nowadays both spring water and non-spring waters are being used, still the health image in the marketing message remains, even for the non-spring waters which are filtered tap water.

Transform the concept to the Internet:

1) One takes something which is basically free: information on the Internet
2) Have a minimal process: clean, organize or sort the data
3) Package it: a web service
4) Brand it: “Your_Brand”
5) Marketing message of the benefit: “Increase your sales” “Generate more leads”
6) Then sell it for a premium price compared to information found using search engines.

In order to achieve this, the problem is in the marketing:
How to address and convince the public or decision makers in companies?

Again: the Internet might be the fastest and easiest way.
How to build the positive image and explain the benefits?
Website, blog, press releases, viral marketing?
Can it be applied in the Business to Business (B2B) market?

So what are your experiences with marketing repackaged free goods? or Internet web services using data from the Internet?
What was your marketing effort?
Was it sufficient?
Did you get any viral effects? Or did you use mass email campaigns?
Could you sell your service at a premium price?