On Tuesday, Amazon was granted a patent for the “ornamental design for a building structure.” The patent, filed in October 2007, could mean that Amazon will be opening bricks-and-mortar mini-storefronts. We’ve seen retailers develop e-commerce sites, but is Amazon going the other way? Stay tuned.
After grand opening day, the hoopla surrounding a retailer often cools. Not so for IKEA’s store in Tampa.
The store opened on May 6th, but the promotions continued through Memorial Day. One simple yet particularly memorable promotion: message bottles.
On a popular nearby beach, four six-foot-tall glass bottles stood on a pier near the water’s edge. Inside the bottles were IKEA chairs, bookshelves, beds, and kids’ furniture. The store’s employees also handed out 6,000 smaller bottles containing a scroll. The scroll asked passersby if their homes were trying to send a message. Each of the small bottles also contained a coupon for a free meal at the in-store restaurant.
The bottles, which tied IKEA to its costal location and community, caught people’s attention by showing furniture in a spot where customers didn’t expect to see it.
Have a quirky project that needs funding? A website called Kickstarter.com might be you the platform you need to make your dream a reality. The site showcases creative projects and allows people to pledge money to the projects they like best.
Among the projects on the site: A filmmaker wants to finish his documentary on The Kinks. . . . A puzzlemaster wants to create a suite of themed crossword puzzles . . . A designer wants to paint a series of “Choose Your Own Adventure” robot pictures.
One person who has used the site to find backers is Andy Baio. Baio is looking to recreate Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” in an 8-bit format (imagine jazz played from a Nintendo Entertainment System). He calculates that he’d need $2,000 to complete the project and has already received pledges three times his funding goal.
On his blog, Waxy.org, Baio writes: “Some people seem to misunderstand what Kickstarter’s for, expecting it to work like Kiva, where there’s a pool of investors waiting for neat projects to throw their money into. In reality, I’d expect very, very few projects to be backed by random people stumbling on it from the Kickstarter website. It hinges on your own social network, your ability to promote your project, and the demand for what you’re offering . . . ”
But, as the Kickstarter site notes, “a good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.”
So, how does the funding process work?
People post their projects to the site. They write a description, upload photos and videos, and plead their case to attract backers.
Project creators also set how much money they need and for how long the pledge period will stay open. If a project does not reach its funding goal before time expires, no money changes hands. It’s all or nothing. (All funding is routed through Amazon.com.)
To entice donators, project creators use tiered incentives (a la Josh Freese). For some projects, these incentives are the key to their success. What value can you give the people who pledge money to your project? How creative can you be with your incentives? For $2,500, musician Allison Weiss offers to write a song about a topic of your choice and perform it live at an acoustic concert in your hometown. Though no one has pledged this amount yet, it’s an attention-grabbing offer.
For project creators, the site allows you to gauge public interest in your idea, gain exposure, and get funding. Also, you keep 100% creative control.
For project donators, you get the perks offered by the creator and the entertainment of watching an idea turn into a completed project.
Harley Davidson started the Harley Owner’s Group (HOG) to bring riders together and give them a venue to share their passion for motorcycles. The group strengthened the brand and built a community for motorcycle enthusiasts.
Groups of photographers met up in their respective cities and walked around, socializing and snapping photos. Then, they went to local restaurants to hang out and discuss the day’s best images. The best photo from each walk was awarded Kelby’s new book.
What’s better than a guarantee that lasts a lifetime? How about a guarantee that lasts several lifetimes.
Lödlark storage cabinet, photo by Niclas Löfgren
The Swedish furniture company, Brikolör, is offering just that — selling its chairs and storage cabinets with, what its website calls, “a guaranteed technical and emotional durability of 300 years.”
The guarantee works as both an external and an internal guide.
Externally, it helps sell the product. It’s an eye-catching offer and gives customers confidence that the product was built to last.
Internally, the guarantee serves as a design principle. In order to live up to the guarantee, the company has to think and design carefully. They have to create sustainable future-forward furniture.
“We want to create new, responsibly,” says the company’s Mathias Eriksson. “We are trying to find out how to strengthen the . . . relationship between the products and the people that use [them].”
Considering the emotional connection between a product and the consumer is important. A product lasts only as long as it’s relevant to the customer, and it’s relevant only as long as the customer connects to it emotionally.
The company’s six prototype products, which include the Pärlan chair ($1,550) and the Lodlärk storage cabinet ($6,550), all come with a lifetime service program to ensure durability.
Does knowing how to make people laugh make you a better businessperson? Peppercom, a New York PR agency, thinks so.
The agency’s co-founder and managing partner, Steve Cody, thinks that having the skills of a stand-up comic makes for employees who are more likeable, have greater confidence, and show more poise when speaking. To test his theory, Cody brought in comedian Clayton Fletcher to work with his staff.
Every few months, Fletcher speaks to employees about stand-up, and discusses how they can integrate the craft into their jobs. The employees give five-minute impromptu performances, which are videoed. Later, a communications consultant goes over the tapes with the performers and gives feedback.
Says Fletcher: “The marriage between client presentations and comedy techniques is a natural one… The less a pitch relies on PowerPoint slides and the more it relies on human contact, the better. When you make someone laugh, there is [an] intimate human contact between you and that person that even the best PowerPoint slide could never approach.”
Through the lessons, employees also improve their skills in breaking the ice with clients, thinking quickly on their feet, and reading an audience.
As organizations tighten budgets and cut spending, it’s interesting to see a company paying to train its employees in something that doesn’t explicitly generate revenue. But, as Cody says, “It’s probably the single smartest internal investment we’ve made in the agency.”
Improv Everywhere is a New York comedy group that, according to its website, creates “scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” The group may best be known for its annual “No Pants! Subway Ride” prank, in which troupe members go about their subway commutes without wearing pants.
In 2002, the prank started with seven participants. This year, 1,200 people participated, and the prank made news. Companies like T-Mobile took notice.
In January, T-Mobile promoted its “Life is for Sharing” campaign by using a Improv-Everywhere-like flash mob.
At Liverpool Street Station in London, people were going about their daily commute when music blared through overhead speakers. 400 dancers in street clothes and station uniforms broke into a choreographed dance. They bopped for three minutes, and casually dispersed.
Using hidden cameras, T-Mobile filmed the event and aired it as a TV commercial, which has been viewed on YouTube over 13 million times.
Buoyed by the success of the train-station dance, T-Mobile created another crowd event which was recently held in Trafalgar Square. 13,500 people gathered to sing “Hey Jude,” “Summer Lovin’,” “Say a Little Prayer for You,” Hit Me Baby One More Time,” among others. T-Mobile passed out microphones to the crowd, and a huge screen displayed lyrics and video of the crowd itself.
Again, T-Mobile filmed the event, ran the “Hey Jude” segment as a TV commercial, and uploaded it to YouTube. The company hoped that the thousands of participants would disperse it among friends.
The sing-a-long video has been up for about a week and has received almost a quarter of a million views.
Thanks to Vanksen Culture Buzz, and their excellent blog, for alerting us to this story.
Pizza generates guilt. Some people feel guilty eating the calories and carbs. Others feel guilty because of the waste. You use paper plates that get thrown out. And, since the box won’t fit in the fridge, you have to wrap each leftover slice in aluminum foil, which gets thrown out, too.
What to do? William Walsh has a solution.
Walsh’s company, e.c.o. Incorporated, has created Green Box, a pizza box that acts as its own paper plates and storage unit.
The box’s lid is perforated to tear into four square plates. The bottom of the box folds over into a space-friendly storage container for leftover slices.
How did Walsh come up with the Green Box? In college, he lived in a house with forty football players who opted to throw out their dirty dishes instead of washing them. One day, they were eating pizza when Walsh noticed grease dripping down his housemate’s shirt. Walsh tore the lid from the pizza box, ripped it into makeshift plates, and handed them to his fellow diners. An idea was born.
Walsh, an engineering student, bought 150 pizza boxes and went to work with a ruler and an exacto knife and experimented on improving the design.
With business partners, Ned Kensing and Jennifer Wright, he later filed a patent for the box.
In 2007, they were granted the patent and went door-to-door to pizza restaurants with their new design. Things moved slowly as the partners worked other jobs and finished up business school.
In the last month, though, interest in Green Box has skyrocketed. What happened?
Wright used Twitter to send a message and web link to actor Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher, who was the first user to reach one million Twitter followers, re-tweeted her message with a note that said “Smart.”
Overnight, Green Box became a sensation. Walsh’s company received 1,500 domestic and 150 international email requests for the product.
They posted a YouTube video, and in five days received over 435,000 views.
Several pizza chains are reviewing the Green Box. Walsh wants to have regional distribution of the packaging so that the company’s carbon footprint is as low as possible.
Scent is an often overlooked aspect of the customer experience. But not for NCP, the UK’s largest parking garage company.
According to a blog post from The Guardian, NCP conducted an online survey of 2,000 people. One-third of the participants said they were unlikely to use a parking garage that had a foul odor. Two-thirds identified the stairwells as the worst smelling parts of the garage.
NCP decided to take action on their findings. Thanks to new technology, they are able to pump pleasant odors into the stairwells. But before they do, they are asking customers to vote on the scents they’d like most. Possibilities include: roasted chicken, cut grass, roses, mint, leather, and wood fire.
Once votes are counted, the scented stairwells will have trial runs in garages in London, Birmingham, Leeds, and Cardiff.
