Most marketers believe that ideas are born with wings, and hence can fly from the word go. Little wonder that creative agencies, which bundle out creative ideas by the dozen, keep hitting the steep cliff that brand managers hold up and say: “Not good enough to fly over the top.”
So, in order to find out what kind of wing design would be needed to power a particular idea, we need to look at some ideas that were initially termed dumb, but actually went on to fly sky-high.
One such idea is the milliondollarhomepage site on the Net. Some geek who thought prime real estate could be created on the Net (builders, take note) hosted a page with one million pixels and sold it at $1 (Rs42.3) per pixel. He made a million dollars in no time.
Try buying one pixel today; it’s all sold out.
Another thought that would be termed foolish: Ho Ho Ho is a gentleman who has a postal address in the North Pole, and pretends to be Santa Claus. He charges parents $10 for every letter he sends their children.
Well, Byron Reese has sent more than 200,000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him richer by a couple of million dollars.
Or even take this website—PositivesDating—which is a matchmaking site for HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) positive people.
The site’s sales in 2006 were $110,000. The point I am making is that no idea is a bad idea, if it’s an idea in the first place.
An induction cooker is an example of a big idea which just does not have the wings to fly to India. Induction cooking cuts cooking time by half.
The hurdles for this idea to take off in India could be our bureaucratic set-up, coupled with policies created to favour some industrial houses, or even the lack of infrastructure to switch from cooking gas to electric cooking.
Elvis Dias is managing director, Amo Communications, Percept Group.
As told to Anushree Chandran.
anushree.m@livemint.com