Big Bidness is a creative think tank managed by Kat O’Neill. Perhaps because she is the biggest thinker. Or more likely because she started the company.
Kat has over twenty years of creative, marketing and sales experience. As a Partner/SVP/Creative Director at award-winning global advertising agencies she has managed multi-million-dollar accounts both domestically and internationally by consistently enhancing performance through innovation, creativity and strategic initiatives. She has been the recipient of awards for efficacy and creative excellence in print, broadcast, outdoor, promotional and interactive. She is also a produced playwright, published author and award-winning photographer.
For more about Kat’s background and her management acumen and why you should trust your business to our business, click here. How’s that for simple?
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Something that is supposed to be a guaranteed success. Could be getting lucky on a first date. Or a business venture. Or an idea. The idiom originated in America and dates back to the 1800’s, probably in reference to gold. How many people risked it all for the sure thing only to discover that the cinch or the lock or the shoo-in or the slam dunk was forever elusive? Fifty percent of businesses fail in the first year. And yet, year in and year out billions of Buddha likenesses are sold worldwide. What makes Buddha such a sure thing? Would Buddha sell as much if the image wasn’t smiling? Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah, was initially a flop and now it’s considered a masterpiece. Cohen wrote 80 verses of the song before he pared it down to its current version, including one at the Royalton Hotel in NY where he sat in his underwear banging his head against the floor. I wonder, how many bangs did it take before Leonard realized he was looking at a sure thing?
It has been said that there are only seven plots. Every story is a variation or combination of those seven. While ideas, on the other hand, seem to be endless. Yet, if you look closely, the same ones resurface again and again with the latest generation thinking it’s their new thought and, often times, convincing the market that they are right.
Which begs the question, if it has been done before could it not be done better now? Computers were done but Apple took it to a whole new level with attention to every detail. The packaging alone set a distinctly unique paradigm of presentation. No one took the time for packaging before. In cosmetics yet but never in technology.
Would everyone still buy Apple for the innovation regardless if every product came in a paper bag? Of course. So why don’t they serve it all up in a paper bag? They could save billions.
The answer is obvious. Apple decided that to be the best everything had to be the best. And sometimes it’s as simple as that.
Darwin suffered from stomach aches, flatulence, belching, headaches, vomiting, rheumatic pain, chronic fatigue, skin rashes, boils, mouth sores, heart palpitations and depression. He kept an accounting of the frequency of each. He was so sick that he couldn’t even make it to his father’s funeral. Though he was examined by many famous physicians no cause of a disease could be found. Many theories were proposed for his illness. These range from suggestions that he was a hypochondriac, that he suffered an Oedipal Complex or a psychosis, that he had an allergy to pigeons, and even that he was being poisoned by arsenic in his medications.
Ironic that someone so unfavored would suggest that only the favored races would survive in the struggle for life.
British polymath philosopher Herbert Spencer coined the term survival of the fittest after reading Darwin’s paper on evolution. Darwin liked this catchy phrase so much that he used it in his fifth edition of On the Origin of Species.
If you ask most people today what Darwin is famous for they will respond survival of the fittest. Few will serve up On the Origin of Species.
And with that I conclude: There is no greater proof of the value and lasting power of a “catchy phrase.”
(A recent hypothesis suggests that Darwin was merely lactose intolerant. If Charles had only laid off the dairy he could have been out partying with his friends and bagged all that research and deep thinking. But then we wouldn’t have that reality show Survivor and all the other reality shows that followed. And Kim Kardashian would just be out hocking her sex tapes. And the world as we know it would be, would be, would be, what, better.)
