Google maps has been around for a while now. Here are two very different, but equally innovative applications:

Trapster warns mobile phone users about “Speed Traps”.

We Tell Stories uses Google Maps to re-tell “The 21 Steps”.  It’s engaging and amusing, and adds a new dimension to the experience of reading a story without taking away any of the imagination and pleasure of reading a book.

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”.

I’m not a CTO or any other kind of xTO, nor am I even an IT professional. But Sun Microsystem’s new Project Blackbox got my attention. An extraordinarily simple idea, as Sun puts it, it’s a mobile data centre. The brilliant part of the concept is that it’s packed inside a shipping container.

Who cares about this sort of thing? Internet.com reports that:

Sun is attracting interest from prospective customers of various sizes in financial services, telecommunications and government and military markets — the kind of verticals where rapid expansion can provide a competitive advantage.

“YouTube went from zero to $1.8 billion or whatever it was sold for in 18 months,” Douglas said. “You couldn’t build a datacenter in that time, so for things that get explosive growth, this is a great fit.”

The Blackbox could also be an effective computing tool in areas racked by natural disasters, where earthquakes, floods or tornadoes trash datacenter gear in buildings. In the event of another Hurricane Katrina incident, the Blackbox could be quickly deployed to help a company get IT operations up and running.

At first glance, this seems like an extraordinary technology innovation. But actually, there isn’t any new tech innovation here. Even the concept of a mobile data centre isn’t all that new. The real innovation is to put it into a shipping container - a stroke of marketing genius.

Are there other ‘concepts’ like this out there? Write a comment and tell me all about it.

Buddha Jumps Over the Wall.

Another one for the collection of great product names.

Cool News writes about this awe-inspiring Chinese soup made from quail eggs, bamboo shoots, scallop, abalone, shark fin, chicken, Jinhua ham, pork tendon, ginseng, mushrooms, and taro.

The name reflects the appeal of the soup: it is said to be so enticing that even a vegetarian monk could not restrain himself and would sneak out of the monastery (literally “jump over the wall”) to steal a taste.

Previous posts on the subject of interesting brand / product names:
Patagonian Toothfish for Lunch?
Change your Name for Success
Non-Descriptive but Effective Product Names

In Viral Marketing for the Real World (HBR, May 2007), Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti describe a simple way to make viral campaigns successful, even when they don’t go past the ‘tipping point’.

Malcolm Gladwell first described the ‘Tipping Point’ concept in his book of the same name. It describes how ideas spread, in a fashion similar to epidemics, with each person exposed to the idea sharing it with others, in an ever-expanding circle of ‘infected’ people who become aware of the idea. The ‘Tipping Point’ concept has itself ‘tipped’ among marketeers worldwide, albeit with the help of some good old-fashioned marketing techniques.

Watts and Peretti describe the mathematics of the Tipping Point concept. Chart 1 below shows how ideas ‘tip’ when the number of people exposed to an idea, known as ’seeds’, go on to share it with more than one other person.

However, when each seed shares it with less than one person on the average, then the idea is doomed to never tip (see chart 2) making it a failure, especially if it happens to be a costly marketing campaign attempting to make use of Gladwell’s concept.

However, marketeers can get around this problem by maximizing the number of ’seeds’ whom they reach at the initial stage of their campaigns.

Chart 3 illustrates the value of a high-seed campaign with rate of reproduction below the Tipping Point - start with a lot of seeds and the total number of people reached is still pretty high.

Alternative Marketing reports that banks in China are offering free rides in a Ferrari to customers who open new accounts with them.

Since foreign banks were permitted to start services in April this year, they have had to go all out to woo the Chinese customer. Persuading wealthier customers to walk in is proving to be tougher than they thought. So in come the freebies. Citibank has given out free Ferrari and Land Rover rides. Standard Chartered has offered wine tastings and luxury-goods promotions. HSBC has held seminars with economists flown up from Hong Kong.

I wonder if HSBC is on to something here…

Does it cost more to give a free ride in a Ferrari or to organize a seminar with an economist? Which kind of customer does each one appeal to? Which kind is more valuable?

Politicians have always been motivated by a desire for power. Not so long ago, though, there were many of them who seemed to realize that that power could be used to influence people, to change their minds, to inspire them to noble (and sometimes ignoble) deeds and endeavours.  Gandhi, Churchill, De Gaulle, Kennedy, Mandela, they left their countries, and the world, a better place, often placing their careers or even their lives at risk.

The last few decades have seen the application of marketing concepts and tools to politics. Politicians have been turned into ‘products’, to be designed based upon the attitudes and beliefs of a”centrist majority” of the population. Few of them still tell us what they honestly believe, and almost none appear to have a vision grander than staying in power.

Even Boris Yeltsin, who brought a modicum of democracy to Russia, was desperate enough in his re-election attempt to hire a group of American consultants. Their focus group research showed that Yeltsin needed to add energy to his image and appeal to youth, which led to the incredible sight of Yeltsin cavorting on stage during a pop music concert. He did win the election.

This whole trend is now approaching the level of a farce, with Hillary Clinton jumping onto the ‘user-generated content’ bandwagon, inviting viewers to choose her campaign theme song.  Adrants has recommended the Darth Vader theme.