I was trying watch LeBron James and Steph Curry as the Cleveland Cavaliers played the Golden State Warriors, when my wife asked me, “what color is this dress”?
“What?”
“What colors do you see in this picture? What color is the dress?”
“Gold and white. Why?”
“You see gold and white? I see blue and….”
So it went. My wife told me later I that I snapped at her for interrupting the game (and, I might have) but I had no idea why she was asking me about some dress. Next day, the news, Twitter, Facebook, you name it…they were all talking about the color of some striped dress. I still don’t get it, really. But, once I realized how quickly this phenomenon spread, I quickly thought, “Wow, think of the publicity for the company or website that sells this dress???” Why was this dress thing so popular?
Why was the ice bucket challenge so popular? I get that it was for a really good cause, but how on earth did that whole thing just take off like wildfire? There was not anything really fantastic about either the dress or the ice bucket drop, so why did those particular things catch people’s attention?
And then, almost immediately, I thought, “Can you imagine how much it would cost to try to pay for this kind of advertising?”
Somehow I stumbled across an article on the Huffington Post by Andy Campbell regarding the striped dress. According to this article, this image was originally posted by a 21 year old singer named Caitlin McNeill who was arguing with friends about whether it was gold and white or blue and black. I read down, and found that the dress is by Roman Originals, and, according to the article, the company DOES know its garment is now famous. You think this has been good for their business?? I would think so.
These types of stories that go viral can appeal to just about anyone on social media. Trying to sell products into the industrial marketplace, it would seem much more difficult to capture the attention of a target audience. But, what if you could come up with a way to get a bunch of people to your website by having a story go viral. Nucor or Ifastgroupe should have taken pictures of hex cap screws and asked, “what color are the threads?” Threads look like stripes. Imagine if a creative distributor came up with and ad or picture that would draw millions of people to their website. Want to tap into foreign markets? Don’t hire a consultant, come up with logo that goes viral.
Send me your ideas, I’ll get them posted and let’s see if we can get something to go Fastener Viral.
The “dress” is a sign of how stupid we have become as a society and insensitive to more important events happening around the world.
A little harsh, but OK. It’s certainly not the most important thing out there but…it’s a dress.
In case you wanted something else to talk about…