Two
What IS a Fad? It's
Not a Better
Mousetrap

A fad is something everyone wants yesterday and no one wants tomorrow.

If you want to make it big in the fad game, you have to rid your mind of all the cliches about success. Take that old favorite: "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." Forget it. While making improvements on an existing product may earn you a little money from the few people who appreciate the innovation, the really big money goes to the person who comes up with something completely different.

I talk to people all the time who are spending all their creative energies trying to come up with things that are 10 percent better than what's already out there. I tell them, "Make a better mousetrap and the world will yawn." If you look at the fads that have been runaway successes you'll see that a true fad has little utility beyond its entertainment value. Think of the Mood Ring, the Pet Rock, the Slinky, Silly Putty.

Don't get me wrong. Useful ideas have their place in the world. VCR's, transistor radios, and the Walkman are useful ideas that eventually became nationwide success stories. But these are more innovations than new products and in general have big companies and substantial advertising behind them. Also, while these products now have huge market penetration, the products built their markets systematically. The first VCR manufactured by Sony came out in the 1960s. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that it reached 50 percent penetration of households in the United States.

It's generally useless items that sweep the country all on their own: no advertising, no marketing plan, no big corporation, no technological innovation. It's an original product. Think of it this way. The VCR in your home today is a vast improvement over the one Sony put out twenty years ago, or you wouldn't have bought it. The VCR is not a fad. It's a technological advance that has won converts the more technologically advanced it becomes. And it is still being improved.

A fad isn't an innovation, and it doesn't change throughout its short life. The Pet Rock the first person purchased is the same as the one the last person to get in on the fad purchased. There is no improved version of the Pet Rock.

To sweep the country, forget being innovative about existing things and think original. I hear all sorts of ideas for better can openers, better corkscrews, and, for some mysterious reason in what amounts to a national obsession, better toilet seats. In the past year alone, I've probably heard of more than thirty ways to improve the toilet seat-better ways to open them, better ways to close them, better ways to shape them (from animals to lips); there are ones that are fur-covered, ones that light up.

That doesn't mean you can come up with a useless item, then sit back and wait for the world to beat the
proverbial path to your door. What if the guy who thought up the Pet Rock idea did that? Do you think people would have called him up and said, "I hear you are selling rocks in boxes; I'll take ten gross"? This is where creative marketing comes in. If you come up with something that's useless and promote it the right way, everybody will have to have it yesterday, even though they get up the next morning and wonder why they bought it. When something is useless, you don't have to be bothered convincing your audience they need it. They don't. Get right up front with that.

The best fads are like jokes. You laugh when you find out about it. It can be a dumb joke like the Pet Rock, it can be a sight gag, or something that absorbs the attention span a little longer, such as Rubik's Cube. By the way, if Rubik had listened to the so-called experts, you'd never have heard of his cube. Robert L. Shook, author of Why Didn't I Think of That!, pronounced Rubik's Cube "just another puzzle that will never go."

Most fads that really fly, if not completely useless, have utility as a small part of their appeal. They are fun first, a statement of something second, and useful third.

Take an item that doesn't so much change a product as change the public's perception of it. An example of this is the Swatch, which made watches fun, cheap, and fashionconscious. This went against the prevailing wind at the time, which was that watches were expensive, serious status symbols, as in Rolex; or were dull, inexpensive items, like Timex.

That Timex let Swatch snatch its market is an example of the mentality that dominates large corporations. Timex just didn't think up something that would make watches fun. They couldn't bring themselves to do it, even though
their market share was slipping from those salad days when John Cameron Swayze captured the public's imagination with ads showing a watch being abused. Remember the frogman diving off the precipice, down into deep, deep ocean, and coming up twenty seconds later with the Timex still ticking? That was new and daring for its day, and Timex sold like crazy.

Swatch is the Timex of the 1980s. They only incidentally tell time. Swatches mostly make statements: I'm fashionable and I don't need to spend a lot of money to be that way. It says I'm secure enough not to have to lay out $6,000 to have a status symbol on my wrist. It says I'm not dull. Peripherally it says, "I don't have to know exactly what time it is. I have people for that sort of thing." Swatch says millions in the bank for the tiny Swiss company that thought up the idea.

Then another company came along and changed even further the way we think about watches. It's Le Clip, and rather than wear its inexpensive fashion timepiece on your wrist, you can clip it anywhere, from your lapel to the visor in your car.

What the Fortune 500 don't think up is to the fadster's advantage. They don't think new, they don't think daring, and they certainly don't think fun. They must chug stolidly forward while making even the tiniest change in direction.

Then there are food and toy fads, which are almost always more fun than they are useful. Nobody needed the Hula-Hoop. And no one needed another form of fastfood chicken until Chicken McNuggets came along. McDonald's wanted to get a piece of the chicken business but didn't want to compete with Colonel Sanders and his barrels of legs and thighs. So they came up with a completely new way of making chicken-in finger-size,
boneless morsels-called them McNuggets, and clucked all the way to the bank.

Consider the chocolate chip cookie. At one time, cookies were either baked at home, involving time and effort, or bought in packages tasting like the bag they were sold in. Then suddenly cookie stores were popping up on every corner. No one had ever thought of selling cookies one at a time like ice cream cones in store front operations until Amos, who's now Famous, and all his imitators set up on the street and gave us what Mom doesn't have time to make anymore.

What Nabisco missed, and Mrs. Fields and the other cookie entrepreneurs took advantage of, was change, and the transient nature of people's tastes and buying habits these days. In fact, the Fortune 500 would do a lot better if they would realize that a lot of marketing these days is fad marketing. No one wants to be buying what the masses are buying. Everyone wants to be the first with a trendy item, and consumer loyalty to one brand is rare. Our parents found a product they liked and stuck with it for life. Everything from Chevrolets to Old Dutch Cleanser was bought and bought again, loyally, for decades.

Not so for this generation. We switch from Chevrolet to Ford and, to our parents' horror, Volkswagen and Honda. We are ready to try the new product on the block in a second. Look at ice cream, for example. About ten gourmet ice cream companies have started up in the past five years, but consumption has stayed about the same. These newcomers eat into the sales of the established companies, and the only way to recoup market share is to
adopt the quick-hit techniques of the upstart competitors.

A couple of years ago the Dove Bar swept the country, really ripping into Breyer's sales. The Dove Bar is not something Breyer's couldn't have thought of if they were of the fad mentality. What's something new we can do with ice cream that doesn't come in a half-gallon package? They are playing catch-up now with Bon-Bons, a chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream, but they really gave away that premium ice cream bar market to Dove without even trying. And now Haagen-Dazs is coming up fast with their own supermarket bars.

Changing existing products that are mass-market items can have the same effect as a fad. Take something everyone uses, like toothpaste. Procter & Gamble, the largest personal-care products maker, really missed the boat on natural toothpaste. Anyone who had lived through the environmental and fitness booms could have predicted that one. Instead, some guy in Maine beat them to the punch with "Tom of Maine's All Natural Toothpaste." It doesn't have any additives or sugar, just natural flavoring. Tom has now come out with a variety of flavors-cinnamon, clove, spearmint. No moss growing on his teeth. But Procter & Gamble could have been in there. With their marketing muscle, they would have had all the shelf space to themselves with a hot fad item.

The changes you make don't need to be useful. They only need to be fun. Take the toothpaste pump. This was a good attempt to make a sexy change in a standard product. Sales rose sharply for Colgate, which did it first. Who is to say that a toothpaste with a pump is any better than one without? The important thing is that it is different. If I were into toothpaste, I would have done the pump; a year later, an aerosol can. Then a year later, I would do bubble gum toothpaste that lets you brush your teeth and blow bubbles at the same time.

So far the big companies haven't absorbed the fad mentality. Otherwise Coca-Cola would have thought up designer water instead of fiddling with the flavor of Coke and leaving the huge bottled-water market to foreign companies such as Perrier.

When trying to launch something new you should do a little research to make sure your idea hasn't already been tried. You would be surprised at the number of calls I get from people on the Fad Hotline telling me what a great idea they have. These people tend to be on the intellectual side-a lot of fad inventors are-and they have been sitting in their easy chairs just thinking, sometimes for years. One guy called up to tell me about blinking lights you could attach to your car to indicate which way the car was about to turn. Another thought a machine to answer your phone when you aren't home would be a great innovation. These are great ideas to someone living in a convent.

Let me tell you something else that definitely is not a fad. Whatever you do, don't sink your life's savings into cliche items. I walk into souvenir and gift shops all the time and feel sorry for the guy who thought up the item that consists of a "stick in the mud." Or how about a bottle of "hot air" or a "losing your marbles" paperweight? These cliches have name recognition but are lifeless. If it was ever funny to see a skull full of marbles with a few dribbling out, it isn't anymore. Forget it.

The same goes for gadgets that surprise us because they go against our expectations. A piece of rubber that turns from blue to orange when you touch it is interesting, but interesting only once. You will not care about it again. There is no ongoing charm and no fun to it.

The same goes for gadgets that do one thing exactly the same way all the time, such as a windup toy that does backflips. Watching a Wallwalker is like watching a cat, something alive, because it doesn't do the same thing over again. Unpredictability is its hallmark. You could say the same thing about Silly Putty. The face you lift off the comic strip page always stretches in a different way. Both the Wallwalker and Silly Putty have an element of human interaction. It matters what you do to them. They can capture the imagination because they take some imagination.

Natural phenomena are not fads, so pass on any schemes to capitalize on such events as Halley's Comet. Besides lack of shelf life (meaning total amount of time its interest is held), most of us have little enough control over things in our own backyard, much less what is going on in the fifth dimension. A lot of shirts have been lost on comets, eclipses, hurricanes, and similar developments.

Like natural phenomena, historic events are out. I know of only one that worked-the Miss Liberty Styrofoam crowns-and that only in midtown Manhattan. I get hundreds of calls from people who spend every waking minute trying to figure an angle on the five-hundredth birthday of the discovery of America in 1992. These people would do better to put their money in a passbook account.

I'm happy to say that the Wacky Wallwalker definitely fits into the useless category. It just crawls down the wall. And it does that fairly well. But there wasn't a crying need out there for something that crawls down the wall. Somebody asked me once, "Well, what is the social significance of the Wallwalker?" Now, I hear a lot of dumb questions, but that's about the dumbest. The answer is, of course, there is no social significance to Wallwalkers. It's just kind of fun to watch one for a couple of minutes. That's it. Nothing more serious than that. That's why people buy them, and Slinkies, and Mood Rings, and Pet Rocks,
something that was so dumb a lot of people found it irresistible.

If there were more fads, there probably would be a lot fewer psychiatrists in the world. Instead of paying for $100-an-hour therapy sessions, you could just get yourself a couple of Wallwalkers and a Slinky and lock yourself up in a room for a couple of hours. When you came out,
you'd be fine.