Last night I went out to a Japanese restaurant, and as I don’t drink any more I picked a Japanese soda off the menu that I’d not seen before.
The drink was pretty uninspiring, but this is the bottle:
That little marble is held in place by the pressure of the gas in the drink, and you push it down to open the drink and release the fizz.
It’s a design that died out around the 1940’s.
Old bottles like this are super rare because kids used to break them to get at the marble to play with. I’ve seen them on eBay for over $60.
The breakage forced manufacturers to design re-usable designs that could hold fizzy drinks
So why bring it back now?
Well, everything that’s old can eventually become cool again, and it doesn’t take 80 years to do it.
Sometimes you just have to shift it to another market, and it becomes completely original.
Over the years I’ve seen a ton of stuff that gets “tired” in the internet marketing world, pop up a year or so later in the corporate world (usually with a more “respectable” sounding name.)
Right now we’re taking corporates who are scared to sell and introducing them to the idea of a webinar with an offer at the end (I know, it’s hilarious that people don’t do this). They’re drumming up sales-qualified leads like never before.
Don’t ever believe someone telling you a tactic is “dead”.
It might have become economically inefficient, in one market, but it can have a new life in another.
Just like this lowly bottle design.