Posts filed under ‘Be the Contrarian’
Disgusting Fumbly Packaging
Just caught an interesting Fast Company posting that provides a fabulously awful example of the Fresh Ideas strategy ‘Be the Contrarian.’
Packaging of the World created a “…design concept that turns sexy cigarette packs into disgusting, fumbly, puke-brown boxes. The idea: to discourage smoking by turning the actual act of reaching for a cigarette into a visceral reminder of smoking’s effects.”
Contrarian components include:
“Instead of a sturdy flip-top, it has a soft lid that weakens quickly, virtually ensuring that cigarettes fall out in your handbag.
Instead of a sleek box, it’s shaped awkwardly like a triangle, so the once-simple act of pulling out a cigarette turns into a maddening ordeal.
And where a razzle-dazzle logo might’ve presided, it’s got huge warning photos that appeal not to people’s fear of death, but to an arguably more powerful trait, their vanity: It shows brown teeth, yellowing fingernails, and mouths puckered with wrinkles. “
How could flipping an aesthetic on its head help you send a stronger message?
How to Make Printing On Paper Good for Trees
Print a Forest applied the Fresh Ideas “Be the Contrarian” strategy to environmentally destructive printing habits, turning them into a funding source for reforesting efforts.
“The premise of Print a Forest is simple: Print 100 Pages. Plant a Tree.
Use our free computer software and be open to having a small message from a brand across the bottom of the pages you print. Branded footnotes from an advertising sponsor fund trees being planted with WeForest.org.
Our software transforms your printer into a tree-planting machine. With your participation, the paper you print results in a tree being planted for every 100 pages. Every tree worth of paper plants over 75 new trees.
Picture a stack of 100 pieces of paper.
Now picture a majestic tree growing toward it.”
‘Confronting Stupid’ with Seth Godin
Successful author and entrepreneur Seth Godin consistently provides provocative examples of the Fresh Ideas strategy “Be the Contrarian.”
His ability to make you think by highlighting an alternative point of view are on clear display on his All Marketers Are Liars blog and in this recent post from the Seth Godin blog, which he titled “Confronting Stupid”:
“…The comedian who fears that each new joke might fail, the writer who has to say something new, the leader who must improvise, solving new problems on a regular basis. What makes this work hard is that it might not work. More and more people now have jobs that require them to confront the risk of appearing stupid on a regular basis.”
2011 Mediocrity
This oh-so-beige video makes the case for innovation by making the case for complacent mediocrity. See the Fresh Ideas strategy “Be the Contrarian” in play here:
