Orange

Silicon Valley is awfully close to the Bay Area, so a lot of its culture seems to bleed over into where I live. It makes sense if you think about it; the people who work there live close by, others want to try to get in on the boom, and Silicon Valley itself is bound to spill over into neighboring areas. Ultimately, I suspect this is why I know multiple people who have ideas about starting their own companies. I don't know that any of them are quitting their jobs and taking out loans against their houses any time soon, but they do have these ideas that they day dream about turning into reality.

As it turns out, my brother had one such idea. He thought up a competitor for the technology company Apple. Now, he's not an engineer or an inventor, and he doesn't have a killer product that would make the iPhone look like a kid's toy. However, he DOES have plenty of ideas about how to market a hypothetical product to compete with Apple's line of products. On the off chance that he ever makes this happen, I'm not going to divulge all of the details here. Still, he decided to call the company Orange, and there are some clever bits to his marketing campaign. I was definitely intrigued, and more than a little amused, by his scheme.

Now, I should also mention that I have a fairly long commute to and from work. And as much as I make sure to focus on the road while I'm driving, it's hard for your mind not to wander. I will occasionally come up with solutions to problems at work this way, since my mind sort of focuses on the details without really focusing on them (as an aside, I've read that this is not an uncommon phenomenon). I will be driving along, worrying about whether the car in from of me is going to merge or not, when I will suddenly get a brilliant idea that neatly solves some technical problem that I was working on that day.

The same thing happens with other random things I have heard before, as well. You can probably guess where this is going. Yes, I will occasionally have random ideas for how to market Orange. Of course, this is me we're talking about, so I tend to have the types of ideas where someone or something is on the receiving end of some ribbing. With that said, I present to you my latest and greatest ideas for how to market Orange:

• Picture a commercial where an Apple product is shown on the screen. It's happily doing its thing, just humming along. Then, the screen pans out a bit, and next to it an Orange product is shown doing the exact same thing, only much better. It can be doing its thing faster, it can be doing it via a much simpler user interface, or it can be doing it on much nicer hardware. It doesn't really matter. The point is, the Orange product is shown to be clearly superior. After a couple of seconds of this, the screen fades to black with a single message in white: "How you like dem apples now?"
• You know how sometimes voice recognition fails? It can be an awfully frustrating experience for the user trying to look something up, but there's really not much you can do about it. The software either understands your particular accent or it doesn't. Keeping that in mind, show a user with an Apple product trying to get directions to their local doctor's office via voice recognition, but failing miserably. Two seconds later, the screen fades to black with a single message in white (apparently I like that as an ending): "An Orange a day won't keep the doctor away."
• As with any technology, there are always hiccups. Apple is no different. As the commercial starts, newspapers with headlines pointing out these issues will be fall on top of each other, one at a time. For example, there were reports that iPhones couldn't make calls at one point. Like I said, it happens with any new technology. As these newspapers are falling on top of each other in a stack, a pop up on the screen asks, "We've all heard about bad apples before. Do you know why there are no sayings about bad oranges?" The Orange product shows up on the screen against a simple backlit background, so that the Orange is seen in all its glory.

Let's just say that I can see why my brother likes to daydream about his marketing campaign. It's pretty fun. And heck, like my brother has said, if I keep this up, I might actually have a future with Orange.