Big Surprises

Scanning around some of my favorite blogs today, I found a few things to share. Seth Godin, author of Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas, has some brief but interesting thoughts about surprising your customers. Roger von Oech, author, inventor and consultant, writes a follow up to his comments on the latest Real Beauty campaign from Dove. His original post was “Giant Beautiful Naked Older Women in Public,” about the Dove campaign “Beauty Knows No Age,” that Roger wrote after seeing a massive billboard for the campaign while in Berlin. There’s a lesson in the relating of the story as much as there is a lesson in the campaign. Bruce Nussbaum over at Nussbaum on Design for BusinessWeek.com was looking for better ways for JetBlue to compensate all those people who sat for 8 hours on a plane during bad weather – and who isn’t? That was an unnecessary mess for which I don’t think there can ever be enough of the right kind of compensation. You can share your thoughts here or over at Nussbaum’s blog. What is the cost to commerce when business travelers are forever waiting in airports for planes that are delayed or cancelled? The answer, however huge, would not be surprising.