Make Mountains Out Of Molehills
I was reading an excerpt from an older work by Guy Kawasaki today and ran across this sub-titled section called, “Make Mountains Out Of Molehills.” Being weird like I am, the first thing I noticed about this section of the book was that this title is not written in the passive voice like we normally see it… “come on, you’re just making mountains out of molehills.” But because of the active emphasis, this means we’re being encouraged to do this thing which is normally construed negatively. So I took a look through this part of the book and ran across a delightful example of “thinking sideways.”
Way back in the old days there was an ongoing feud. Two well-known names battled it out on a daily basis for supremacy. No, it wasn’t the Hatfields and McCoys – it was Sears and Wards. Back in the infancy of catalog shopping, which is the grand-daddy of today’s internet e-commerce, Sears and Roebuck fought over customers with Montgomery Ward. I believe history indicates that Wards actually beat Sears to the punch with catalog shopping itself, an incredible innovation for the time. But Richard Sears didn’t let Ward’s “first to market” status be an impassable mountain. What did he do?
He trimmed his catalog.
I know, you’re thinking, dude wtf? But seriously… this forerunner to the modern e-commerce mogul went outside himself and the natural ego-centric way of business-thinking and thought about what would make a customer shop from his catalog instead of the Wards catalog? The simplest answer was to make it the first catalog the customer looked at.
Anyone who’s a catalog collector like me knows that somewhere in a drawer, in a corner, in a bookshelf, under the bed, or even on the coffee table, there are stacks of catalogs. Back in the dawn of catalog shopping, catalogs were often used to teach reading. It wasn’t unusual to keep the catalogs and the almanacs, in fact, on the coffee table or the kitchen table. In a stack…
So making the Sears catalog a little less tall and a little less wide meant it couldn’t function as the bottom of a stack – it had to be on top!
Sears’ tactic worked and actually had far-reaching social effects… you never hear someone casually refer to “the Ward’s catalog.” It’s always “the Sears catalog,” and “the Farmer’s Almanac.” Think about it…
Sorry, ouija has no special extra insight.
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We should have a forum on how we can resize Google.
And cut it into a million tiny little pieces …
I probably should have made this more obvious when I wrote the article – the tactic Richard Sears used was to TRIM the catalog so that it was too small to be put underneath the Ward’s catalog – it had to be stacked on top of it or the stack would fall over.
Thanks for the post, good information. Keep posting!