Imagine this: you're in a meeting in which a group is trying to come up with an advertising strategy for a company called Compare the Market, which sells insurance, energy, and mobile phone plans.
Somebody says, "How about this--we use an animated meerkat! It's a pun, see--market, meerkat!"
Somebody else says, "What's a meerkat?"
"It's an animal. I think it's part of the mongoose family. See, he's upset because he's got this campaign called Compare the Meerkat, but people get getting it mixed up with Compare the Market!" What do you think?
"Meerkat and Market don't actually sound alike."
"We'll give him a Russian accent! Then they do sound alike, sort of!"
So...what do you think you would have said? Choose an option:
1."Most people don't even know what a meerkat is and it's a terrible pun and this could be possibly the worst idea I've ever heard."
2."I don't know...does anybody else have any other ideas? ...No? ...Nobody? OK, I guess we'll try it."
3. "Brilliant! I predict that this campaign will take our website visitors from 50,000 a month to 2 million a month, give us 25% of the market, and lead to a 16% in profits, worth more than £10 million. What's more, eventually we can publish the "autobiography" of this character and it will attract more advance sales than the life story of Tony Blair!"
As you probably are aware by now, number three would have been the most accurate. The "autobiography" of Aleksandr Orlov", the meerkat in question, is being launched for the big Christmas book-buying season and is expected to be a best seller. It's probably only a matter of time before there's a movie, a TV series, a line of toys.
Me? I would have chosen answer number one. Remind me never to go into advertising.
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