Million dollar idea number… who can count? I’m writing it up here so that when it happens and I say, “I predicted that,” I’ll have some hard evidence to point to. So here’s the scheme.
You know those companies that make pretty much everything boring that everyone needs, like soap and toasters or whatever? I dunno what everyone needs, I don’t buy that stuff, but you guys know. Companies like GM or Johnson&Johnson or Coke and Pepsi. They have a wide range of products, many brands all competing with themselves and one or two other major companies, and a slew of tiny companies.
Imagine you’re CEO of Pepsi and actually want to do your job instead of sit on your piles of money. You have this problem. You have like 100M people that love Pepsi and only buy Pepsi and never buy Coke when they’re buying pop, but they buy some chips and bean dip and they buy uh… whatever chips Coke owns, not the Pepsi chips. So pick one of those people. Maybe this guy doesn’t really care which chips he buys, so it would just take a tiny incentive to make him go for the Pepsi chips instead. This is an opportunity.
Achievements. For those of you who don’t play video games Achievements (or Trophies) are the great innovation of the newest generation of consoles. They are awards given for accomplishing tasks in game that remain with an account outside of any game. So my friend who plays first person shooters gets awards for playing his games, and I can get awards for playing role playing games, and we can still have some competition and comparison between the two of us. It also gives extra incentives within a game. Instead of just saying, I beat Mario, you can say, I beat Mario and I never died, and I have the Achievement to prove it.
It sounds stupid. It’s not though. Meaningless points have meaning to people and the Achievement system has taken off in the gaming culture. I don’t think it has to stop there, though. I am proposing that companies make real life Achievements.
I don’t know exactly how one would want to implement such a thing, but I suspect a good way would be something like this. A person goes to a website and ops in, making an account at Pepsi.com or whatever. Once you have an account the user can look at all the Achievements out there to get. These would be things like, drink a swimming pool of Pepsi or eat a half ton of chips. On this site they would make clear what products count toward the Achievement. Then Pepsi would automatically track your progress based on your purchases, and you’d get little badges and stuff when things were accomplished. Now the user is part of the ecosystem. If he can he’ll get all his goods from Pepsi, barring some large difference in taste, quality, and/or price.
Partnerships could be made between companies with non-overlapping businesses. That way you could make one account and have Achievements related to a wider variety of products.
There would be fringe benefits besides the added tiny incentive. Companies could identify their biggest customers easily, and highlight them, using them for promotion and contests. Achievements could be used to encourage exploration within the brand, trying a variety of products, or new products when they are released. When another Achievement system is inevitably released, the rivalry between systems could increase sales for both sides, and would definitely increase loyalty and involvement of the customer bases.
I don’t think it would be without benefit to customers either. For one thing it might be the kick in the teeth one needs to realize they’re spending too much money on something, or that they need to eat healthier. When you get an e-mail from Pepsi congratulating you on your ten thousandth dollar spent at Taco Bell, you might view fast food a bit differently. It would also make shopping a bit of a game. Make life a little more interesting. It would be good to know I’d used 100 bars of soap when I have, or whatever. It could also be a tool for getting to know people. You could look them up and see what they were proud of. Some girl you think is cute has on her wall that she’s spent $10k at Taco Bell might be an interesting piece of information to have.
Perhaps the major companies won’t adopt this scheme. But it might be an opportunity for a new niche brand. If you make generic everything, perhaps you could use this scheme to gain a few percentage points of market share and earn those millions you so deserve. Or maybe some company will make the achievements and get the companies to sign on. Maybe the game is like a kind of advertising. If I was those guys that made Farmville I’d create some system like this, and get a few companies to sign on cheap to get started, and then new companies could get their Achievements added in for a reasonable price.
You convinced?