Bottled Air
Stupidest idea ever!
I was watching The Lorax last night and there was a scene of a woman having a man refill her air dispenser which made me laugh at how stupid that was!
It then moves on to a commercial for bottled air! Ridiculous right?? Wait wait, it gets even better! People in the commerical are captured having a party with people coming in with 6-packs of bottled air! You can see how refreshed they look and feel after consuming that bottle of air!
I was laughing so hard at this thinking to myself, this is ridiculous! This is the worst business idea ever! Who’s stupid enough to buy this?
Mr. O’Hare (the investor in the scene) agrees with me, but then the entrepreneurs pitch their business model. They talk about how their research shows that if you put something in a plastic bottle, people will buy it! Not only that, but when they “build the new factory to build the plastic bottles, the air quality is going to get worse, which will let people want their air even more!”
At that point the investor loves it and says, “the more smog in the sky, the more people will buy!”
Anyway that still sounded like a ridiculous business idea to me! Who would ever by air? Something that’s already available for free!!
But then I thought to myself…………. bottled water?
Decades ago, people probably would’ve said the same thing about bottled water, “Who would ever by water? Something that’s already available for free!!”
So I did my research, and came across a very interesting concept: manufactured demand. In the 1970's big soft drink companies got worried as their growth projections started stagnating, because seriously, how much more soda can people drink? Enter sparkling water! A stupid fad that not a lot of people bought.
“Water is free!”, everybody was saying, “why would I suddenly want to pay for it?”
So those companies started thinking how can we start making it more appealing? Which takes us back to.. manufactured demand. Because people aren’t buying your product and going crazy for it, you make them scared of the alternative, tap water! Then the storm of ads against tap water start rolling in like Fiji’s Cleveland campaign.
Then you glamorize your product under images of fantasy using mountains, tree’s and picture-perfect nature:
But guess where a third of all bottled water comes from, THE TAP!
Anyway, after that whole thought process while I was watching the movie I figured I shouldn’t laugh at them buying something as absurd as bottled air, because there‘s probably another person laughing at me sipping on my pretentious Evian bottle.
This makes me think, what other things (basic human rights) do we pay for on a daily basis that would seem absurd for a person 50/100/1,000 years ago?
