By the Bye

Knowing your market - Pong (Beirut) Enthusiasts

Can you guess where this picture was taken? 

Dick's?  Sports Authority?  Toy's R Us?

Answer:  None of the above.

I snapped this photo at my local grocery store, Stop & Shop.  That's right, the same place I buy Ho-Ho's and green tea (the guilt of one clearly offset by the antioxidants found in the other) sells a litany of ping pong balls.

Some of you know instantly why this store stocks enough pong balls to outfit the entire Chinese national table tennis team for a year and leave Forest Gump drooling. 

Alas, I do not live in The People's Republic, nor Green Bow, Alabama.  This store is located at Brigham Circle, in Boston, MA.  Besides being the nexus of health-care in the city, it also neighbors Northeastern University.

And, as many of you already have concluded, college students love their beer pong (or Beirut as we called it at Hartwick).

Think of this for a moment. This national grocery chain must be deluged with so many requests, that they have dedicated an entire section of shelf space for these plastic poppers.  This is an environment where the Nabisco's and Pepsi's of the world are charged thousands for the "privilege" of offering their products at Stop & Shop.   And look how much space is allocated for p.p. balls !  There are 18 slots, which hold 4 packages of 6 balls.  That's almost 432 balls on hand when the shelf is full.  Assuming they retail for double their wholesale cost, they are making a buck a package.  They must be selling copious amounts of these projectiles to warrant this.

However...

This isn't about the per unit profit.  This is marketing. 

You see, college students need other items when they purchase pong balls.  They need cups, chips, dip, hot dogs, frozen pizza and Ramen.  By offering one more, highly specific and non traditional item they need (clearly in hordes), Shaw's fixes themselves in their consumers mind as the place for all their shopping needs.  They are willing to sacrifice valuable space on a low net item, in order to sell you much more when you come looking for your "gaming" need.  There isn't a Wal Mart for miles, so proximity is their ally, but this offering helps ensure they are drawing in students when shopping for their favorite pastime, so they can up-sell them when they get there. 

If I were them, I'd go one step further and put an end cap in place with all these items in one spot.  Too bad you can't sell beer at grocery here in Mass (damn Puritans)....

I can just hear it now from a frat house not too far away....

Frat boy 1:  "You get the keg, I'll get the cups". 
Frat boy 2:  "No doubt.  Just head over to "SS" and scope out some "Solo's" and "rocks".

Ahhh, the good ole days......

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Have you seen another "random" item at the supermarket?

How about another example of a retailer selling something outside of their core market offerings?

Inspiring Robbie Maddison, Red Bull and your companies innovation.

Happy New Year and a grand "welcome back" to the real world for many of you.  I hope you had a chance to see an amazing feat this New Years Eve.  Just about the turn of the calendar, Robbie Maddison flew his bike higher than anyone before, as a follow up to breaking a classic distance record last year.  You have to see it to believe it. This gut wrenching display of fearlessness was a testament to Robbie's vision and need to push the limits, as well as, the never ending ability of Red Bull to support athletes in the drive to break boundaries. This is how they differentiate their brand, and no doubt they helped conceive and execute this stunt with their partners in Las Vegas.

After Robbie collected himself, an ESPN commentator asked him, "if he was going to go bigger"?  "What was next"? 

All I could think was, "how the hell is he going to do that"?! "He'd have to jump over the moon"! 

You know what?  That's exactly what he should do.

Sure, he can't actually jump over the moon, but he could use that as a metaphor for inspiring his next stunt. 

Innovation in sport, business, or any other arena in life, needs to be sparked by ideas.  BIG ideas.  Ideas that sometimes are so out of this world, they could never be achieved.  That's how you build to 'bigger and better' solutions. 

What if you wanted to make the first sneaker that would allow anyone to dunk a basketball.  What would you do?

Propulsion devices in the heels?  New materials that react differently with certain surfaces, or at different speeds/force?  Court and shoe combination's that respond to a players intent specific to the feedback presented by the shoe??

How about eliminating the pesky problem of humans requiring so much food and sleep?  Where would you start? 

New diet pills?  Auto pilot systems in cars (close by the way)?  Recording devices that capture the ideas in our dreams?  The 'perfect' smoothie?  Promotion of a new paradigm in cultural norms by reshaping the expectations and actions of the people [we could learn from the Spaniards]?

The point is not to distract from the purpose of your innovation.  It's simply to start in the stars and slowly bring it down to earth.  Sometimes you can't think about simply going "bigger", with a 'height' in mind.  You need to think CRAZY BIG, then worry about how you can make it happen.

Let's hope Robbie and Red Bull find some spectacular inspiration.

I, for one, will be watching next year.