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.)
Because wearing a green hat in Chinese sounds like the word for cuckold. And we all know that a cuckold is some poor sap who is the last to know that his wife is out sharing the “goods.” Green is death on the newsstand. As quoted by Alexander Liberman, Conde Nast’s Editorial Director from 1962 to 1994. Race car drivers stopped driving green cars after two horrible crashes. Rumor has it that it was the arsenic from Napoleon’s green wallpaper that did him in. And yet green is supposed to make you happy. Hence “the green room” where guests await their interviews.
What do you think? Can a color really be so powerful?
Imagine if all the products were just white. And all the marketing was just white. You could only wear white. Every billboard was white. Would it be soothing or just plain dull? Researchers say that blue lends a feeling of quality and trust, red makes people want to act and green makes people want to spend money. Yellow tends to get the most attention but it can be hard on the eyes.
One study showed that the color combination with the most powerful psychological effect was a yellow title with white text on a dark blue background. The question is, was it a good psychological effect?
Some think you should create an identity through all your marketing and products with one or two colors you use over and over. This is a very basic and effective way to tie all your stuff together in the minds of customers. Maybe. But I think a logo can accomplish consistency and recognition and still afford you flexibility in design. Of course you could ignore color all together and just make the product the hero. That strategy certainly worked for Absolut.
“All the women had purple noses and gray lips and their faces were chalk white from terrible powder. I recognized that the United States could be my life’s work.” Helena Rubinstein, cosmetics magnate.
If only securing your niche in the marketplace was always that obvious. Finding the need is step one. Step two is promoting your find. Helena knew how effective marketing could be. She was one of the first to use celebrity endorsements. She understood the perceived value in overpricing. She knew the trick of implying pseudo-science in the defining of her skincare line. She made sure her packaging was luxurious even down to her beauticians adorned in neat uniforms. No detail was left to chance. She even commissioned Salvador Dali to design a powder compact.
Would she have been as successful with just seeing the obvious? The answer is no.
She sold her company to Lehman brothers for 7.3 million in 1928. She bought the shares back for less than a million after the crash. That must have been a nice moment for her. Not so much for the brothers. Her company grew to be worth well over a 100 million.
I wish I had some shares of that stock. For now I am banking on spotting an old powder compact with the initials S.D. on it.
Seagulls and mimes share a place in this world – both are loathed. Now I’ll get to defending mimes another time, but for now let’s look at the seagull. Seagulls are monogamous, mate for life, rarely divorce, are nice to their offspring and truly value friendship. Yes they will eat your avocado and tomato panini if you leave your towel for a split second but that is only because they have excellent eyesight and good taste.
They are one of the few species of seabirds that can survive on drinking salt water. They are expert fliers, having mastered control of winds, thermals and dives. They have a highly developed communication system with sounds and movements which you may have noticed when two or more are battling for that morsel you are contemplating tossing from your car window.
What is most intriguing about seagulls is how creative they are at problem solving. How do you open clams and other hard shelled mollusks without a knife? Drop them on rocks from just the right height. Too high and someone might swoop in and retrieve your dinner. Too low and the shell won’t break. How do you teach your offspring to be kleptomaniacs? Demonstrate how you can steal another bird’s catch midair or what you can learn by observation. Somehow the seagull has figured out that the pelican needs to drain the water from its beak before swallowing. So the seagull waits for the pelican to make its catch and then grabs whatever it can before the pelican has finished draining.
The seagull is also the state bird of Utah. If not for the seagulls dealing with a plague of crickets the Mormons never would have been able to settle Salt Lake City. The feat is called, “The Miracle of the Gulls.” Now did the seagulls know that they were changing the fate of hundreds of thousands? Probably not. They just like to eat crickets.
Now before you write me off as nothing more than a gullophile, remember this. Think like a seagull. In business. In life. Always be on the lookout for opportunity. Use innovation to overcome unforeseen obstacles. And ignore those haters. They’re just jealous they can’t fly as high. With our without a panini.
I began by selling securities, winning a two-week trip to Europe for selling the most government backed mortgages, and have been selling ideas ever since. While at JWT I launched Listerine Pocketpaks and won the Unilever Caress business that, in turn, resulted in Unilever awarding the agency the Vaseline business. I convinced Nicole Miller to design a line for Wildaid. Traps, a television spot I did for Wildaid, was named one of the best spots on Ad Critic. The outdoor, print and television campaign I did for NYC Choppers resulted in the company being invited into the elite custom bike competition. I was part of the winning team for the JCPenney account being awarded to DDB, Chicago, Tanqueray and Eveready being award to JWT and Swatch being awarded to Weiss, Whitten & Partners. While at Chiat I launched the Barelythere lingerie line. The launch so far exceeded sales expectations in the first six months that the agency was awarded a substantial bonus. The creative was named best spot in Adweek. Additional award winning accounts I worked on include Absolut, Armani, Barnes & Noble, Bass, Bud, Business Week, DeBeers, Ferrari, General Mills, Guerlain, Lubriderm, Olay, Ralston, Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, Unilever and Wonderbra.
That line always worked for Vito Corleone. We figured why not give it a try. An added incentive: The 100th client gets that hot European bike seen above. That’s right, a nice printed copy of it.
