“Anything simple always interests me.” — David Hockney

I met a guy at the Madrid airport while waiting to board my flight to London. My typical rule of thumb is never to engage in conversation while en route. I find it distracting and airplane time is my reading time. Although my guard softens when standing in line, sitting at the gate or waiting for shuttles… today was one of those days. So we talked and actually he was a pretty cool guy. He does brand management for some consulting firm and it reminded me of an article that I read about how Staples (the office store) spruced up their brand with its “easy” button.

If you haven’t seen it, well, here’s the story about the gimmick as told by Michael Myser in Business 2.0. He writes, “To reinvigorate its advertising, the company in mid-2004 hired McCann-Erickson Worldwide, which also created MasterCard’s nine-year-old ‘Priceless’ campaign.”

“Shortly after winning the account, a group of McCann copywriters and art directors held a marathon brainstorming session. Leslie Sims, a senior VP and group creative director, mentioned how nice it would be if she could just push a button to come up with a great ad, so they could go to lunch. The Easy Button was born.”

“A string of Easy Button commercials premiered in January 2005 and also aired during the Super Bowl a month later. As a result of the advertising onslaught, customers began asking about buying real Easy Buttons. In September 2005 the company began selling $5 3-inch red plastic buttons that when pushed say; ‘That was easy.’ This quarter it will sell its millionth button.”

Saved Button

This got me thinking… someone needs to come up with a gimmick that reminds people to save money. We could call it the “save” button and every time they think about spending money on something frivolous they hit “save” instead of being tempted to spend money. Now that’s a modern-day stress ball.