Innovation by SIT

Several years ago a friend of mine, who runs an Internet site selling wedding gifts, asked for some ideas to help him differentiate his site from the rest, and thus improve sales.

To find ideas, I decided to apply SIT’s Breaking Symmetry technique with the “wedding day” as the starting point.

To do that, I asked myself in what way is a wedding day symmetrical ?

One simple symmetry that came to my mind is the obvious fact that the husband and wife celebrate their wedding day at the same time.

This helped me come up with the virtual idea or pre-idea (something that is not an idea in itself, but triggers a thinking process that leads to an idea) of having some kind of wedding day that the husband and wife don’t celebrate on the same day.

Here is more or less my line of thought from there:

First I thought that what I’m actually developing here is not new kinds of gifts for a wedding day, but actually a totally new kind of anniversary day - for which my friend’s site would be the only one to offer such gifts.

Then I moved on to actually developing the idea. What would this celebration day be? What would it commemorate?

SIT’s Closed World principle dictates here that this new day should be closely related to the wedding day, but the Breaking Symmetry dictates that the husband and wife celebrate this day separately (something like a birthday).

Then it hit me !

Why not combine the birthday and the wedding day into one? I then came up with the idea of an “Equality Day” (bad copywriting, I know, so if you have better names please send them to me as a comment to this post).

So what’s Equality Day?

It’s the one specific day in the life of a married man or woman, after the wedding, on which he or she celebrates having lived the same number of days as before the wedding.

For example, if someone were married at the age of 25, his or her Equality Day would be when he or she is 50 years of age.

Now it’s not that easy to calculate the equality day, but that’s a good thing! My friend could offer an “Equality Day calculator” on his site - this would be an attractive item. He could also offer an “Equality Day reminder” and use this to catch email addresses.

Of course, inventing a new kind of celebration day would enable my friend to generate a wave of public relations opportunities, that would also help him to bring a lot of traffic to his site.

Another important feature of the Equality Day, is that most people would celebrate this day when they’re around 50 and have a lot of money to spare (theoretically)!

There are also all kinds of spin off ideas, like having a section on the site devoted to celebrities’ Equality Day.

And, of course, we need to think of special gifts for Equality Day…any ideas?

…And if by any chance, your Equality Day is in the next 7 days, write to me and I’ll send to you a special gift!

See you in my next posting,

Roni

Visit Roni at the start2think website