“We thought that we were selling the transportation of goods; in fact, we were selling peace of mind.”
Fred Smith, CEO
Federal Express,
Fast Company, April 2000
Visit a game of the St. Paul Saints, a minor league baseball team located in Minnesota. Do you watch intently for two and a half hours as no-name players get hits or strike out? Probably not. You watch the mascot, a piglet being chased around the infield. You finally get a haircut in the stands. You treat yourself to a massage. You dine at one of the high quality booths set up by local restaurants. Furthermore, you enjoy the setting of the sun on a cool summer evening; you are not indoors like the major league team across town. The St. Paul Saints know that they are in the entertainment business, not the baseball business.
In the late 1990s, Whit Alexander and Richard Tait invented a board game. Their choices for marketing it were few. They could buy a booth at the February New York City toy and game show along with hundreds of other toy inventors and hope that they were “discovered.” They could try to sell the game to Parker Brothers or Mattel. Or they could try themselves to get the game into game and department stores themselves, which would be a long, frustrating, and laborious process. Instead, they became innovative. They presented the game to the president of Starbucks and suggested that the game’s target market was the same as Starbucks’ target market. Starbucks had never sold games, but their founder saw potential. Cranium was sold exclusively through Starbucks and the game’s owners gave each Starbucks employee a free copy of the game. The rest is history. Cranium and its spin-offs have been the best selling games since Pictionary.