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No charge

4 Jun 2009

Here’s an idea for wine brands – it’s free, or should I say “there is no charge attached”

As the BBC pointed out yesterday, people in Britain consider Broadband at home “essential”, like water or electricity. I agree. I’d also add, that the next move will be to demand it outside the home too, so they can continue their daily business – work, shopping and conversations, on their mobile devices.

There are more and more hotels, bars and restaurants are offering Wi-Fi (although hotels try to charge for it which is just wrong!) which is a great idea – although few are using this properly to their advantage (I’ll post on that as well soon). But as this becomes more common, it will lose its power to impress. Once it is expected, it will only be an issue if it is NOT available.

What no-one has yet done in the restaurant trade (to my knowledge) is address a major shortcoming of all this mobile interaction – access to POWER. CHARGE. ELECTRICITY.

A customer could easily walk into a bar with any combination of laptop, iPod, mobile phone, camera or games console. Want to be their friend for ever? Offer them access to power points (or should I say sockets). The clever bar manager will also have a set of chargers for the most common tools & brands (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, PSP, etc.) available which customers can borrow FREE.

There have been many times I could have been sharing my experiences of the food, wine, and the location but I couldn’t for fear of running out of battery (in my vocabulary for obvious reasons this is now called “twitter juice“). You should have seen the look I got when I asked recently if they happened to have a charger.

If you are a wine brand with ANY form of online presence, why not brand these tools and make them available instead of just sending out more ice-buckets or menu covers?

I’ve even got a name for the branding campaign – “No Charge”

Just a thought. If you do something like this, let me know!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Consumer marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • If there was ever an idea worth following up on this is it - especially since many mobile devices use a USB style cable (except for iPhone and the wonderconnector..) and laptops have standardized to a handful which are available in multi-tip packages. (See the Targus travel charger line.)

    The real problem with this idea is .... the lawyers! Yes - like most good ideas the cautious lawyer can scare off any company with one "what if" ... "What if the customer plugs your charger in and their device stops working ... and they blame you!"

    Could be the device was old - the internal power circuitry was already weak - the local grid spiked at the wrong time - regardless, the happy customer just became unhappy.

    Not as far fetched as you might think. Here in the US we call it the "Lawsuit Lottery" - where everyone is trying to win a big windfall - and good ideas get lost in the legal swamp.

    I really like the idea though..... I would love to leave the house without the three to five pounds of power bricks I carry in my backpack.
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