Trendwatching and Marketing, Part II

3. New Business Ideas are Everywhere
It
seems there’s no shortage of unfilled needs that could become the core
of wildly successful businesses. Here are a few I noticed:

Ralph Stevens turns 100 (See #4, below).
(Photo by Alana Horowitz Friedman)

A. Mail-back kiosks and/or check-this-as-luggage containers at airport security checkpoints:
My 13-year-old son brought his oboe on the trip, including a set of
four tiny screwdrivers, like the sort for tightening eyeglass frames.
TSA confiscated three of the screwdrivers. (I offered to let each of
the four of us take one screwdriver, but this was not acceptable.)
Apparently there was some rather inconvenient way we could have mailed
it to ourselves for $10, but it would cost less to replace them. We
could have also sent the whole bag through checked baggage, but the
risk of damaging or losing the instrument far outweighed the
convenience of keeping the screwdrivers.

There must be thousands
of items per day that are confiscated, causing great inconvenience to
the owners of the objects, and also a substantial disposal problem for
TSA. Someone should come along and contract with the postal service and
TSA to set up a self-service mail kiosk at each security checkpoint,
with a selection of small padded envelopes and the ability to type an
address label and take credit cards. Charge actual postage plus maybe a
$3.00 or $4.00 service charge, of which two-thirds would be profit.
Someone would need to refill the envelopes and be available for
maintenance problems, but the post office would collect the packages
for free.

Another possibility: rent small suitcases big enough
to go through baggage without being lost or crushed, with drop-off at
any airport in the U.S.

B. Travel planning website for fixed dates, open destination:

We’ve been trying to plan a trip for our next vacation, over Christmas
week. But we have to try one destination at a time. The truth is, we’re
not so fussy about where we go. I’d like to be able to select a date
range of two or three days on each end and see destinations ranked by
fare within broad categories of U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific.
Then we could quickly narrow it down and click for more
information/booking. I checked with two prominent travel experts;
neither knew of such a site.

C. Urban compost centers:
In my brother-in-law’s food-co-oping, Prius-driving, recycling
Minneapolis neighborhood, a lot of food scraps end up in the municipal
garbage system. If someone could figure out a way to create a business
model around composting, while still keeping the disposal a free
community service, it wouldn’t be hard to generate a significant
quantity of waste. I live on farm and my neighbors sell composted cow
manure for $5 a bag, but my guess is they sell only a few bags per
week. Still, there surely must be people who would pay for high quality
compost; it’s just a matter of figuring out who has the need, wants to
pay, and can generate enough orders to be worthwhile. Garden centers,
perhaps? They’re already selling fertilizer. Or maybe the garden
centers should operate the compost operation.

4. Aging Populations Have Different Needs
My
sister-in-law’s grandfather, Ralph Stevens, turned 100 while we were
out there, and we went to the party along with about 40 of his
relatives. I’d never been to a 100th birthday party before, although I
did go to my neighbors’ 70th wedding anniversary.

When I was a
kid in the 1960s and 70s, many people born around the beginning of the
20th century were dying off; if you lived past 70, you were considered
old. Yet 76,000 Americans have reached that amazing 100-year milestone–and
these are the same generation that appeared to be dying off thirty and
forty years ago. What marketing opportunities are presented by people
living to be 100? By having four or five generations of the same family
alive at once? What does Ralph Stevens, a wheelchair-using blind
centenarian who loves to sing and lives in close proximity to a large
family, want and need in his life? How would you market to him in his
nursing home or through his family?