Owning The Idea: The Designer Fire Extinguisher

12/10/07

Written By:

Piers Fawkes

6024 articles

Piers Fawkes is the founder and CEO of PSFK, leading retail & business intelligence platform, founder of Retail Innovation Week and co-founder of Wallkit. Piers is considered a trends and innovation expert and is called to provide talks around the topics of the reports that he and his team publish every month. He has provided hands-on advice to future-forward brands including Apple, Facebook, Google, Nike, Red Bull, Samsung and Target.

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Rob talks about the elegant 'designer' fire extinguisher that sells for $25 in HomeDepot (the red ones retail at about $9) and points out that in the awards it has won and the reviews that it's received, no-one ever mentions how well it works - just how good it looks.

The subject of a recent Rob Walker column in the New York Times magazine reminds us of a key trend Allan Chochinov told us about in his presentation at PSFK Conference New York 07. Allan argued that we were beginning to consume the idea of a product as much as consuming the product itself (you watch the video and work that out). Rob talks about the elegant ‘designer' fire extinguisher that sells for $25 in HomeDepot (the red ones retail at about $9) and points out that in the awards it has won and the reviews that it's received, no-one ever mentions how well it works – just how good it looks.

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