How channeling rage created a brand new market
Ever feel like you just need to SMASH something?
I’m usually a pretty mild mannered guy, but I’ll confess that I can come pretty close to “hulking out” sometimes.
My last job as a programmer brought this side of me out. I’d spend all day developing an iPhone app, and let me tell you… After 2 straight days of trying to figure out why the screen would flicker when you tapped a button, well…
If someone had shoved a baseball bat into my quivering hands, I’m pretty sure my laptop and iPhone wouldn’t have lasted 3 seconds.
Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Most people these days have sedentary office jobs where they spend all day fighting against the onslaught of email and office politics. Even when you feel the frustration boiling up in your throat, you have to smile and keep your head down.
In modern society there aren’t a lot of places where you can let off some steam.
Well, a Polish entrepreneur Zdzisław Hoffmann noticed that too. And he saw an opportunity for a brand new kind of business: the “rage room.”
This guy goes around and collects junk—old TVs, mirrors, microwaves, printers (for you Office Space fans out there)…
He takes it back to his business, which is just a warehouse with plywood on the walls.
Then hairdressers, managers and software developers walk in and pay him $54. He hands them a helmet, and they choose from an array of baseball bats, sledge hammers and other weapons of blunt destruction.
And for 30 minutes, they get to let out all that pent up rage at Apple computer and their arrogant App Store policies, at the manager who just humiliated them in a department-wide email, at the garlic-breathing customer who wasted an hour of their time and didn’t even leave a tip…
It’s a brilliant business idea. I wouldn’t be surprised if he could turn it into a franchise.
What makes this business work is a fundamental principle that marketing luminary Eugene Schwartz taught in “Breakthrough Advertising”:
He talked about “mass desires”—primal needs that are shared by millions of people. And he said that the job of good marketing is to tap into these mass desires and focus them on a specific product.
That’s what Hoffman did with his “rage room” idea.
If he’d had to go out and educate people on why they should be interested in putting a sledgehammer through a flat-screen TV, his “rage room” would have been DOA.
But since so many people lead lives of barely suppressed volcanic fury, all he had to do was find a creative way to channel that anger—and voila, a brand new market was born.
The takeaway here—
In your business, don’t try to swim against the current of mass desire. Find a way to tie what you offer to something people desperately want.
That’ll keep your bank account full—and keep YOU out of the rage room.
By the way, “Breakthrough Advertising” is packed with timeless marketing and business wisdom like this. It’s hard to find these days—and it’s expensive.
Grab a copy here while you still can: