Prize under cap

This story the author heard from the marketer of the Russian branch of Coca-Cola.

Everyone knows the lottery, which was held in the nineties. On the reverse side of the bottle caps of coke, icons were printed that denoted the prizes: a glass of a free drink in McDonald's, a soccer ball, a bicycle, and so on. And there was one Grand Prix among the prizes. It seems that the main prize was a large sum of money, say, a million dollars.

How to launch such an action? At first glance, everything is very simple: one of the caps is just placed with the dollar icon, at the factory it is screwed onto an occasional bottle of coke, the bottle goes to the store, someone buys the bottle, unscrews the cap, finds the Main Prize on it, receives the prize and becomes a millionaire.

Preparations for the action began. Ordinary caps marked with prizes, screwed onto bottles and sent to stores exactly according to the scenario described. It was the turn of the Main Prize. The cap with the icon of $$$ was produced in a single copy under a special order, and personally the president of the Coca-Cola Corporation in Russia, with a dozen accompanying people, entered the factory, stepping along the red carpet, holding a crystal box with the cap. He went to the conveyor to throw it into the heap of all other caps. And then he stood still in his position, as the whole harmonious scheme collapsed in one moment.

First, as it turned out, there is a certain percentage of damaged bottles. There is one chance for many hundreds of thousands of bottles that the machine that screws up the caps will tear off the screw thread or will not pick up the cap, and as the result it will not be screwed onto the bottle. The percentage is extremely small: less than 0.001%. But still there is a chance that this will be the bottle with the winner cap.

Therefore, you have to screw and seal the cap by hand, or monitor the device. This is not too much of a problem if we are already at the factory.

The first problem was coped quickly. But here there was a second one: it turns out that when the coke is taken from the factory, there is absolutely no control over which region this or that bottle will go to. There’s absolutely nothing to control: put the box in a random truck and it drives wherever he needed. But the problem is that the action was carried out only in certain stores which signed the advertising contract. In addition, the action was conducted only in Moscow, St. Petersburg and a few closest cities. What to do?

One could solve this problem quite simply: take the bottle from the conveyor belt, find out from the driver where his party is going, and put the box with the prize bottle in the right truck.

Nope. Only a portion of the bottles delivered to the store are presented on the shelves. The other part the store sends to its partners and corporate clients. How to be sure that the bottle does not go to a buffet or a cafe, where it will be just thrown out in a trash can by the waiter?

Well, there's nothing to do. They had to choose a random store in Moscow, come there personally and put the bottle on the shelf. And look after that it is not taken by cashiers or security guards.

So now, there is a bottle with the Main Prize, standing on the shelf among the other bottles of coke. People come to the store, they buy something, they look at the shelves. Despite the fact that the bottle is in the most prominent place, all buyers take other bottles. One hour, two hours. The bottle still stands on its place. A homeless enters. Passes through the departments, approaches the shelf with soda. Looks ... looks ... and begins to reach for the bottle. Here, a team of managers sitting in ambush can not stand it, runs up to the shelf and practically tears the bottle from his hands, because it's obvious to everyone: now he will unscrew the cork, without even looking at it throw it into the trash can and all the action will go to waste!

The final of the story is as follows. Managers just stood near the shelf and waited for the first decent visitor. When he went to the shelf and began to choose soda, they took the prize bottle and offered him with the words: „Sir, take this bottle please, it could be a winner one!“. Here, of course, it turned out that the visitor did not come for the coke, but for the Russian kvas, so he had to persuade him for a while. And then force to open the bottle without leaving the store. And then make him look under the cap. And then get the interview and escort for the Main Prize, because he could not believe in this happening for a long time. But the action finally happened and the „winner“ was found.

This is an embellished, but absolutely truthful story about how people tend to underestimate the complexity of ideas that are so simple at first glance. In the era of rapid development of Internet technologies, the mind becomes dull. It begins to seem that any idea can be realized by simply clicking your mouse. In fact, even the most simple idea under the hood contains a huge number of nuances and pitfalls and may prove to be completely unrealistic.

In his practice, the author often encounters an excessive simplification of ideas. „This is just a map with dots“, says the client, talking about the courier delivery service with geolocation. „It's just a video site“, says the customer, who wants to create his own Youtube. As a rule, they are all very surprised when it comes to a couple million rubles for the implementation of their project.

Every time a thought comes to mind, which reduces the idea to the form „It's just“ — it's worth stopping and remembering the story about the Coca-Cola action: it was just a prize under the cap.