Unleash Your Ideavirus - Part Two

Choose One: An OXO Good Grips Peeler or a Toyota Prius

Ideas are more than just essays and books. Whether it's a new product, a new piece of technology, or a new way of creating new products, an idea that wins ultimately does so because of intelligent seeding by its creators.

Remember what I told you about manifestos -- that a manifesto is a carefully organized series of ideas that is designed to get someone to come around to your point of view? The most obvious way to make a complicated argument is with a book. But you can just as easily -- and sometimes more effectively -- send it through a song, as Bob Dylan did for Hurricane Carter, or with something as elegant as an OXO Good Grips vegetable peeler or as potentially important as a Toyota Prius.

When you first see the OXO, you instantly understand the idea behind it. You just know that it will work better than whatever peeler you're using now -- and cut you less often. The design of the OXO is a manifesto that says, "There's a smart, comfortable way to do this annoying task." Is the OXO going to get viral? Not across the general population, of course. But among foodies and the hive of people who love kitchen stuff, it already has gone viral. Just take a look at the glowing reviews of this peeler on Amazon's kitchen site.

Now compare the OXO peeler with the Prius -- Toyota's opportunity to save the world with an ideavirus. This is the car that is designed both to take a whack out of the greenhouse effect and to conserve our remaining fossil fuels. It's the only family car that has ever won an award from the Sierra Club.

Because its engine is powered by both gasoline and electricity, the Prius gets about 50 miles to the gallon, gives very good performance, and emits close to zero pollution. Everything about it says, This car is important!

Unfortunately, because Toyota is a factory-based company that uses ideas -- rather than an idea company that owns factories -- it has built the product completely backward. Let's start with the name. How can you tell someone about a car you're excited about if you don't know how to pronounce its name? Is it Pry-us, or is it Pree-us? I don't want to feel stupid, so I just won't say the name at all.

Second, is there a smooth way for me to spread the word? The Toyota Web site doesn't even show the Prius on its home page. When I search for it, I finally do get a very nice page. But is there a "Tell a friend" button? Is there information on how I can set up a test drive? Is there a place for me to give my email address so that I can give Toyota my permission to get information on when the car will be available in my neighborhood? No, on all three counts.

What about a community-activism component with teenagers going door-to-door with petitions, planning to lobby the local government to buy Prius police cars? Or letter-writing campaigns that spring up from grassroots environmental organizations around the country? Nope.

But the biggest mistake Toyota made was the way it designed the car. Unlike the VW Beetle and the Mazda Miata, the Prius is not a moving billboard for itself. In fact, it looks rather, well, ordinary.

You could have 1,000 of these cars drive right by you, and you wouldn't notice one of them. You wouldn't notice the styling, you wouldn't notice the superior gas mileage and the lack of emissions, and you certainly wouldn't aspire to own one just by looking at it.

Are the people at Toyota on a mission from God? Are they acting like zealots, aggressively pushing a car that will change the world for the better, the most powerful idea to come out of the car industry since Henry Ford perfected the assembly line? Just how committed are they to their own idea? What a lost opportunity!

An idea merchant in search of a virus would take a very different tack: Instead of trying to make it cheap and boring, she would realize that the first people to buy a car like this are people with money to risk on an unproven technology. And she'd recognize that the opinion leaders and nerds who are most susceptible to this idea are also the most likely to want to drive an exceptional car.

So she would redesign the thing to be stunning. Different. With unique colors, using special environmentally approved paint. Maybe include a permanent bumper sticker with an LCD readout that gives real-time information on the car's exact current gas mileage. The first 50,000 people who buy this car will be doing it to make a statement. And every person who does so will be making that statement to the 1,000 or 10,000 people who see them driving by each day. It's a virus waiting to happen.

And finally, an idea merchant wouldn't let just anyone buy the first models off the line. She'd select the very best sneezers, and do whatever it took to get these folks to drive the car. James Bond? Julia Roberts in her next film? The mayor of Carmel, California or the head of Greenpeace?

This is urgent! This is not about making another few million bucks from a Web site. It's about changing the world, infecting the population with a positive virus, and doing it before the vacuum fills up with junk, when it will be too noisy to communicate about something that really matters.