Promoting Fun and Hot Air Balloons
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Vince McMahon. Sam Walton. P.T. Barnum.
These three men have something in common, and that connection is the very reason I have been inspired by them. They are all great promoters. But even more than that, their style of promotion always contained within it a spirit of childlike fun.
I grew up
watching pro wrestling. (My favorites? Bret “The
Hitman” Hart, “Rowdy”
Roddy Piper, and Randy “Macho
Man” Savage.) Vince McMahon, the
owner of the WWF (now known as the WWE), has always impressed me
with his promotional abilities. It’s unfortunate that he
tends to get some of his ideas straight from the gutter, but in the
heyday of the WWF, he brilliantly created characters and crafted
story lines that really pulled you in and got you excited.
Wrestling was colorful, larger-than-life, and fun.
I read a book a few years back by Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart. Of course, depending on who you talk to these days, Sam and his company are now carrying out Satan’s plan to rule the world. But Wal-Mart’s current humongousness causes folks to easily forget that at one time not long ago, Wal-Mart was a scrappy start-up, and few people believed Mr. Walton had any chance to succeed with his “wacky” business model of putting department stores in small town with tiny populations. What stood out to me as I read the book was learning about Walton’s creative and fun approach to promotions. Here is an excerpt from his book, about his very first venture running a Ben Franklin variety store:
We tried a lot of promotional things that worked really well. First, we put a popcorn machine out on the sidewalk, and we sold that stuff like crazy. So I thought about it and finally decided what we needed was a soft ice cream machine out there too. I screwed my courage up and and went down to the bank and borrowed what at the time seemed like the astronomical sum of $1,800 to buy that thing. That was the first money I ever borrowed from a bank. Then we rolled the ice cream machine out there on the sidewalk next to the popcorn machine, and I mean we attracted some attention with those two. It was new and different — another experiment — and we really turned a profit on it. I paid off that $1,800 note in two or three years, and I felt great about it. I really didn’t want to be remembered as the guy who lost his shirt on some crazy ice cream machine.
I
recently finished up a book by Joe Vitale about P.T.
Barnum (of Barnum & Bailey circus fame), and again was
impressed by the outlandish, creative, and downright childlike
promotional ideas he used to promote his various businesses. Like
the time he had an elephant plowing the field on his property to
attract the attention of train passengers speeding by on their way
to the city. Or when he became the first person to bring live
hippopotamuses to America to promote his museum. He also was one of
the first people to have a man in a hot air balloon attempt to
cross the Atlantic.
It is from this inspiring sense of fun and spectacle that we devised the idea of our most recent Lemonade Stand event. I think it all started from a discussion I had one night wiith my brother Doug. We were trying to come up with some fun marketing ideas, and I blurted out, “You know what would be awesome? Giving away a freakin’ hot air balloon ride.” Maybe the spirit of P.T. Barnum was being channeled, but we both loved the idea. It took several weeks to decide that the idea was actually actionable, and thus we launched our Kim & Jason Easter Egg Hunt, with the grand prize being a trip in a hot air balloon.
The prize was awarded sooner than I imagined (I guess I need to do a better job of hiding it next time;) Yesterday, Kimberly Sellers from Pennsylvania e-mailed with the secret code word indicating that she had found the prize egg. An excerpt of her e-mail is priceless:
I had to keep reading this. Are you serious? I won? I so can’t believe it. oh my gosh. I think I am just sitting here having trouble typing. My husband isn’t going to believe me! This is so cool!!!!!!!!!
Yep, that is pretty cool. And I am left with a few thoughts. Every business is trying to get the word out about what they do. We could have easily spent several hundreds of dollars on a boring newspaper ad that would be glanced at by a small percentage of people and then be pooped on by dogs all over Dane County the next day.
I’d rather put my marketing budget into something fun like this. The buzz spreads, somebody wins something really cool, and a story gets passed on. Meanwhile, the very prize we gave away empowers the winner to do exactly what we advocate: to embrace a more childlike way of living life with less stress and more fun. This (and the previous promotion in which we gave away someone’s wishlist) have been fun and educational experiments.
Fasten your seatbelts kids, because more stuff just like this is on it’s way.
(By the way, even though the hot air balloon ride has been rewarded, there are still plenty of eggs that contain some neat prizes hidden throught the store. Have fun!)
Technorati Tags: Wal-Mart, WWE, Vince McMahon, Sam Walton, P.T. Barnum, promotion, marketing, buzz, hot air balloon, childlike, dog poop
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February 9th, 2007
GOT
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Buds! (Note, JessiGirl’s
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One of first symbols we saw was the bagua, which is a
Chinese Taoist symbol with a yin-yang in the middle–it became
the basis for the DHARMA Initiative logo, and was even seen two
weeks ago as an Easter Egg in “Not in Portland” (on
Rachel’s bedstand). The basic interpretative meaning, as with
most things having to do with Taoism, has to do with balance and
relativism of the inner spirit with the outer universe, and the
eight sets of trigrams on the side are used in geomancy
(determining destiny, feng shui, and so forth). The dots in the
center of the yin-yang show that few things are pure, and that
there is a little light in dark, a little dark in light, and that
both are needed for balance. I go into a little more detail about
my own thoughts in my 
The bagua is not the only 8-sided figure seen on
the show with significance. There is a repeated motif of 8-sided
symmetrical shapes, from the atrium Michael is seen standing within
in “Special” to the university building Donovan comes
out of in “Flashes Before Your Eyes”. Figures similar
to this were seen on Isaac’s wall in “S.O.S.” and
exactly like that pictured here as flashed pictures in “The
Lost Experience”’s psychology testing video. While the
bagua is a complex figure, the Dharmachakra is a bit more simple,
appearing just as a wheel with 8 spokes, much like a compass rose
(LOST, anyone?). This symbol has its roots in Buddhism and
Hinduism, with the 8 ’spokes’ representing the 8-fold
path to inner peace and enlightenment.
This is a symbol that obviously most people can recognize
as Christian in significance (though crosses have a long and varied
history in many other cultures), and as representing the
sacrifice/crucifiction of Jesus Christ. The Christian symbols on
LOST are almost too many to name, but just dealing with
the cross alone, the most notable was Eko’s pendant cross,
which in the story, passed hands several times. It went from him to
his young brother, then back to Eko, temporarily to Locke, and then
back to Eko’s grave–representing the passing of faith
between characters. Eko also carved a small cross on his stick
(along with tons of scripture); he told Claire, “These are
things I need to remember”.
These symbols were a big mystery when they were
first presented in “One of Them”, following the first
down-past-zero countdown. Back then, people scurried to find their
meaning online and through Egyptian hieroglyphics translaters, with
one of the most popular literal translations ominously having to do
with death. Since then, the writers revealed their
“true” definition for the show at Comic Con this
summer: “Underworld”. According to what is discovered
in “The Lost Experience”, they are also representative
symbols for the Valenzetti Equation, which predicts the apocalypse.
Coupled with Rachel Blake’s nickname, Persephone (from Greek
mythology, the goddess who got kidnapped to Hades), I think the
concept is “going to hell and back.”
And finally, we get to the symbols from this
week’s show. The tattoo Jack has on his shoulder is actually
a real life tattoo of actor Matthew Fox, but the writers
incorporated this into the plot (I’ve created a JPEG image
for this blog, so people don’t have to download special
software to read the Chinese characters). However, it’s
interesting that they had Isabel translate them into something
quite different from their literal meaning. The actual translation
is a line from a poem by Chairman Mao Zedong (”Eagles high,
striking the void”), which has some interesting connotations
in itself about being a master of one’s own fate
(there’s that theme again). As a reader of some Chinese, it
was curious to me why they went to such lengths to incorporate
their own custom line, “He walks among us, but is not one of
us,” which matches very closely to the title, “Stranger
in a Strange Land.” This title is both a reference to the
Exodus 2:22 passage and to a 
This is the one that’s got me puzzled. I
haven’t seen a symbol quite like this, and I’d
appreciate input into what it could be a reference to, or if
it’s just a unique symbol to LOST (there are lots of
symbols that are star-like, with 8-rays, but not that many with a
single asymmetric ray). I’ve heard comparisons from Wiccan
octograms to Tarot cards to the Scarlet Letter, but perhaps the
most convincing possibility for a reference is to the 