Pretty Interesting…! But then…will only work once…you cant create businesses out of it…!
I have realized, that customers are (much) smarter than you think they are…(or you would want them to be!)! And that creates an impact…a big one…on businesses…especially the ones in the repeat business segment (almost everyone).
These guys can clearly not do a business of buying bicycles cheap and selling them for a profit creatively! Once…it works…twice rarely will.
So value has to be created and it mostly always has to be either tangible or quantifiable. Cost and convenience are the biggest value creators…hands down. And the hardest to create…!
On Creativity:
Back in 1995, 3 friends – Sumita Anand, Rajshekhar and the undersigned got together to do a Fashion Show in what was then Calcutta.
We put in Rs. 25,000 each, hired the Ballygunge AC Hall to do the ‘ Zero to Two Zero” fashion show for kids – just born to teenage and made commitments of a few lacs more. Back then kids were not recognised for their potential to drive sales so only the toy guys came forward to sponsor. If we could not sell tickets, we were going to go bust next week. And we had no money for advertising!!! (The one hoarding we put on Park Street was costing us Rs. 20,000 for a day).
For heavens sake we thought – we thought we’d be famous and here no one even knows of our bright idea. So we huddled together and put on our thinking caps. We had a good logo which we got printed on kite paper (the bright kind of paper in yellow, orange, green and magenta) on small 1 x1 inch bits. Rajshekhar our sourcing genius went and bought a couple of thousand pencils in stock at Rs. 0.30/pc – Total spend Rs. 1500.00. Sumita, Raj, Urbi, i and a few friends spent the next few nights pasting these bright slips on each pencil. In the day time Sumita went around to school principals saying we wanted everyone in India to hold a pencil so to kick start the event we’d want to distribute free pencils to all kids on Saturday!! We could cover just 5 schools and distribute just about 5000 pencils. We gave them away and prayed kids would talk.
And did they talk???? I bet every kid did quite some talking – just like i did when Boost gave us a free drink in school. Come Monday morning, my colleagues in the export office knew it, my uncles boss knew it and so on and so forth. And the dear phones wouldn’t stop ringing. The cash register at our ticket sales counter also rang quite well and thankfully we closed the show and restricted our losses to just Rs. 25,000 each.
Phew! thank God for Creativity!!!! thank you Boost for giving us an idea!!! and thank you to Ganeshji for drinking milk which made us believe in the power of word-of-mouth!!
Keep thinking out of the box.
GP
Brilliant!! Innovative and I am sure a great learning!