Unexpected Messages
Education is your Best Marketing Tool
Last week my family and I were on holiday in Napier, New Zealand and on one of the days we visited the Arataki Honey Visitor Centre in Havelock North. The centre was fun for the kids and we all learned something more about bees and honey, as well as the damage caused by the varroa [...]
I Yike the Yike Bike
I have been fascinated by the New Zealand designed and developed Yike Bike, which has been profiled on New Zealand TV3 recently, and has also been launched at the Germany Eurobike Show this last week. The Yike Bike is an electric bike, that can be collapsed and carried away in a carry bag. With a [...]
Photos of Apollo Moon Landing Sites
I have been quite intrigued by the photos from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter taken a couple of weeks ago which show the Apollo moon landing sites. As you can see in the photos below, there are are few dots with shadows showing the lunar modules left on the moon surface from the manned missions. Plus [...]
Willy Wonka Differentiation
This blog is about business differentiation, but not just small points of differentiation – I’m interested in differentiation that is unexpected. Differentiation that re-defines the game, violates expectations, and grabs attention. We have already seen some great examples of this – Terracycle who built a business on worm poop and waste, Moller who is working [...]
Hottest Curry in the World
A few years while living and working in London I was fortunate enough to attend a team lunch at The Cinnamon Club, an upmarket Indian restaurant in Westminster. At the time the restaurant was (and may still be) part owned by Sir Michael Caine. I was intrigued to find that this same restaurant recently received media [...]
Start with an Unexpected Business or Product
Unexpected messages follow naturally from an unexpected business or product. It is difficult to deliver an authentic unexpected message if your business and products are undifferentiated. If you want to deliver messages that have real impact and grab attention, maybe the best place to start is thinking about how you can make your business or [...]
I Need Some Space
April 1981 - Living in the USA, the nine year old boy from New Zealand was obsessed with space lego. He watched on television as the Space Shuttle Columbia took flight for the first time and dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut. Like the generation before him, who had witnessed the first manned space flight [...]
I don’t eat organic lentils but I did vote green
On Saturday 8 November, just four days after US citizens voted in Obama in as their new President, New Zealanders too went to the polls to vote in their preferred Government for the coming three years. Now I generally don’t consider myself to be an organic lentil eating, vege patch growing, tree hugger. However, this [...]
Ripped off by the Discount
Even at 4pm on Saturday afternoon Borders was packed (okay, so I’m exaggerating just a little – this is Wellington, New Zealand after all). Pushing our 6 month old boy in the buggy in front of me, I slowly navigated the isles, while my wife and daughter sat reading books in the children’s area. Why [...]
The Pig Ate My Plate
According to a recent Time Small Business article The Dish on Green Disposables Americans use an estimated trillion disposable plates and utensils every year, with each disposable plate’s useful life averaging just five minutes. Add to this the fact that disposable plastic plates do not decompose – they sit in landfills for hundreds of years. [...]