The Quisenblog

When I say “beverage bottle,” you no doubt have an image that comes to mind. Maybe it’s clear. Maybe it’s colored. Maybe it is plastic, or maybe it’s glass. Maybe it holds 12 oz. or 24 oz. But chances are you see the same basic shape and form as everyone else.

Everyone except for Stephan Linfoss, that is.

Linfoss is an entrepreneur in Finland who is having us rethink what a bottle is all about. And by rethinking the bottle, we’re forced to rethink everything associated with it—from what goes in it to how it is disposed to what its role is in our lives.

Linfoss describes his bottle as being “bagel shaped.” It is round, made of clear environmentally-friendly plastic and is reusable. Plus, it functions in ways ordinary bottles cannot. It can be stacked in the refrigerator, saving space. It can be attached to a belt or purse. But the most compelling feature of the Linfoss bottle is how it connects with people.

People are drawn to it. People want to touch it, inspect it, and see how it works. It puts a smile on people’s faces. And they can’t wait to show it to others.

If I were Coca Cola, I’d buy Linfoss’s design in a New York minute, no matter what the cost. Because as soon as consumers see that cool bottle at the point of sale or in the cold box, it’s game over. This bottle could do more to affect the sales of Coke (or whatever new product the beverage maker chose to put in it) than a $20 million ad campaign.

This design is a wonderful lesson in approaching a situation with a “beginner’s mind.” Linfoss points out that specialization and insider knowledge can be the enemies of breakthrough thinking. “You don’t want to have too much knowledge of the industry as a designer,” he says. “(Knowledge) prevents you from flying high enough.”

The bottle as we know it has existed pretty much in its current form for more than 150 years. If it didn’t exist in its current form today, we very well would approach the problems of “creating a commercial beverage container” quite differently. Given the technologies and materials available today, if you were asked to design a container from the ground up, you could easily arrive at the conclusion a bagel-bottle would be far more functional than a standard shaped bottle.

If something as simple and ubiquitous as a bottle can be “evolutionized,” then you have to accept the possibility that almost anything can be. And that—the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there is another, better, more engaging way of providing the most mundane piece of our offerings—is the whiff of possibility that gives us permission to dream about what would happen if we “set our conventions and knowledge aside” and truly created.

Posted by Mickey

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Mickey Uncategorized advertising, creativity, ideas, marketing, product package, radically unique

The name George Kingsley Zipf is one you probably aren’t familiar with. Yet his observations more than a half-century ago proved prophetic in the world of marketing.

Zipf (1902-1950) was a philologist and professor at Harvard. He noted that the most popular word in the English language (“the”) is used ten times more than the tenth most-used word, 100 times more than the 100th most-used word, 1,000 time more than the 1,000th most-used word, etc.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Turns out the algorithm he discovered for the popularity of words is pretty much universal in all categories. What’s true with words is also true for consumer products and services. The #1 automobile model/hair gel/soft drink brand sells 10 times more than the 10th most popular, 100 times more than the 100th, etc. This phenomenon has come to be known as Zipf’s Law.

These findings, when combined with the realization that consumers really only have room in their conscious brain for 2 or 3 products per category, shows how perilous it is to settle for being number 10 in a category (or number four or even number three). Consider the category of online search. Chances are if I ask you to name a search engine, you’ll say Google. If I ask you for others, you may say Yahoo or MSN. If I ask you to name more, you’ll probably be stumped by the time you get to #5. The reason is, you have no reason to know five search engines.

With that in mind, what can you do to get in the top of the heap in your prospects’ minds? It is doubtful you’ll be able to get there by being “incrementally better” than the category leader. You have to offer a true difference. A meaningful, demonstrable difference. A game-changer. Something that is obvious, yet has somehow been overlooked by every other competitor in the category.

An example of this that comes to mind is Reef sandals (http://www.reef.com). Reef set out to make the “ultimate surfer sandal.” One of the things they did to make their sandals radically unique was to put a bottle opener right into the sole of the sandal. Brilliant! How many times have you been on the beach and had no way of opening that ice-cold bottle of Corona? Simple. Elegant. Obvious. And totally, radically unique. There is no other sandal like Reef. The company succeeded in changing the “sandal paradigm” of hard core surfers, and broke away from the pack. They gave their audience a reason to “move them up the ladder.”

I guarantee that if you spend as much time and effort thinking up ways to make your offerings “radically unique” as you now do to improve them incrementally, you’ll have way more to show for it.

Posted by Mickey

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admin Ramblings advertising, George Zipf, marketing, radically unique, Reef Sandals, Spokane