Snake Coffee

In an age where the media lays on the hype for gadgets and products with more, better features, it’s worth looking at some very successful innovations with fewer features:

a. Firefly Mobile

The fun phone designed from a kid’s point-of-view.  With just 5 keys, this phone keeps kids connected to the people who matter most.  Includes lights, sounds, colors, and animation.

b. Nintendo Wii

It doesn’t have the HD graphics, super-fast processor chips or DVD / Blu-ray drives of its more expensive competitors Sony PS3 and X-Box 360. A technically inferior product with a superior interface (the Nunchuck) and simpler games, targeted at non-users of video games.

c. Detergent / Skin Care products without perfume for people with allergies.

Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, took issue with Marshall McLuhan in a recent interview with McQ:

In truth, the message is the message. People who think too much about the medium—opt-in newsletters, the Internet, Web 2.0—are making the same mistake that people have made for years in education. Remember how the 8-millimeter film was going to revolutionize education? Then the VCR? Then the personal computer? The medium can certainly help, but an 8-millimeter film didn’t salvage a bad math lesson.

Case in point, the new advertising campaign for the Sony Walkman is claimed to be the first ‘monophonic ad’, created by deconstructing an original musical work into individual notes, then recruiting 128 musicians and giving them each just one note to play, thereby re-constructing the original melody, in spectacular waves of sound and movement.


Advertising that entertains, delivers the message and gets talked about - it can’t get any better than this.

Sir John Hegarty of BBH puts forth his point of view.

Nick Padmore has analyzed the 20th century’s 115 best slogans, straplines, taglines, and headlines, as nominated by some of the stars of creative advertising, and tried to find a pattern that spells out how to do this successfully.

1. Be five words in length.
2. Not mention the brand name.
3. Be declarative.
4. Be grammatically complete.
5. Be otherwise standard.
6. Contain alliteration, metaphor, or rhyme.

Of course, there are exceptions to these rules, but the analysis shows that the majority of the best slogans et al. do fit this pattern.

Here’s a provocative chart from the analysis:

In the same vein, here’s an interesting excerpt from MIT’s Adverblog:

Match these brands - Sony, Hummer, Mercedes, Haagen Dazs - with their slogans: “like nothing else”, “made like no other”, “like no other”, “unlike any other”.