Selling Vapor
Ideas are tough to sell because people don’t adopt ideas easily. I knew a sci-fi writing couple who claimed to have popularized the concept of “ecology” in the 1960s as part of a language adoption experiment. Their observation (which may be sci-fi itself) was back then it took about seven years for a new concept to become culturally ubiquitous. We can assume that in our Internet age that it takes about seven minutes. The problem with marketing an idea of any type (including intangible services) is that ideas may or may not be facts. Facts, data, features, benefits – these are elements that people can wrap their minds around. They are manifestations of already adopted concepts, and thus easy to accept. When anthropogenic global warming theory was first released, nobody aside from a few alleged scientists had conceptualized the theory, and it took time (about seven years) for the notion … Continue reading →