Bizcuits | Pet Rock of yore

Leanda Lee

The inventor of the Pet Rock died the other day. In 1975 a strangely uplifting novelty craze inspired by a conversation over a beer was created by Gary Dahl. The idea was complete whimsy; a minimal-effort pet that didn’t need walking, feeding, or looking after. The New York Times reported that at US$3.95 per ‘pet’ packaged in an aerated cardboard pet-carrier with nest and minding instructions, the fad swept the US and similar markets in a short lived burst of “ridiculously successful marketing”. Soon Dahl was employing 300 people, sold 2 tonnes of the stuff at a cost of about a cent a piece and made himself a millionaire.
There are age-old toys that cycle in and out of fashion: knuckles or jacks, yoyos, skipping ropes, spinning tops… Dahl’s product was different. It lead a new age of marketed toy and novelty fads, some lasting longer than others, like Nerf balls, Slinkies, Silly Putty, Rubik’s Cubes and the eventually banned Click-Clacks. Innovative success doesn’t just happen at any time or in any place. There has to be a confluence of factors. Dahl put The Pet Rock craze down to timing; American society had had enough of bad news (Watergate and Vietnam) and was in need of a bit of levity. The 70s was also a time of self-indulgence and the pace of life was increasing. A pet without effort; that absurd piece of frippery with a giggle was snapped up by consumers and media alike.
Undoubtedly that spark of lubricated genius didn’t come from nowhere. Dahl’s expertise as an advertising man – he was the author of the book “Advertising for Dummies” – gave him the foundation to package and market the product, and operate his business. He saw a market need and he met it. Timing was also crucial for Dahl himself. As the freelance copywriter, he had an incentive at that particular time to move beyond his state of poverty (an eternal state for most freelance writers) to invest effort and other resources.
Dahl’s story shows when it comes to innovation, excellence doesn’t have to be dull, and fun doesn’t have to lack rigour. Indeed, these attributes have become pre-requisites in our competitive economy since that time.
Macau needs more innovation. What is critical for Macau’s search towards diversification is essentially innovation. Innovation, creativity, new businesses, they come from somewhere. Innovation needs to be nurtured and have the essential conditions for success as we saw in the Pet Rock story: resources, such as time, money and other sorts of capital; market need, access and opportunity; creator incentive, expertise, excellence; and some spark. With one difference to the Dahl story, value ideally needs to be captured for a longer period than found in such fads unless we find a way of creating a series of fads and fashions.
Macau has the resources, an abundance of resources. The incentive to innovate has now been made abundantly clear in its immediacy given the declining revenues in our dominant industry and the subsequent declines in GDP – we have now seriously heeded the call. We’ve been slow to act, for a threat is never as good as the in-your-face consequences that we are feeling now. What we struggle with is the market need and expertise. Expertise will be bought once Macau acknowledges the need, for it takes close to a generation to build internally – time which we don’t have.
Understanding the market is our problem. We still talk of industries, products and services from MICE, Chinese medicine, retail to tourism and education. These meet needs but we haven’t defined whose needs these industries and services are going to meet. We don’t hear talk about the customers, what they look like or where they come from. If Macau’s no longer the pet SAR able to pull the big gaming bucks from across the border, then whose bucks are going to replace them? Only then can we start to answer what is it from Macau that our innovators can entice these customers to buy.