In a world where travellers have wide choice in who they fly with, Icelandair have come up with an interesting way to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Passengers flying over the Atlantic can stop over in Iceland for up to seven nights, at no extra cost. They can even be accompanied by a stopover buddy …an Icelandair employee…who will help them explore the country. The stopovers are available to anyone flying between Europe and the USA or Canada with Icelandair.

The scheme seems to achieve a number of things simultaneously:

1.    It gives people a reason to pick Icelandair over other carriers
2.    It promotes Icelandic tourism
3.    It creates free publicity for both the airline and the country

Is this an idea you could take inspiration from? Could you give your customers something free of charge, which none of your competitors can match? Or could you ‘hijack’ them mid-transaction to give them the opportunity to try out something else you want to sell?

www.icelandair.us/stopover-buddy

Have you ever considered the extent to which Google  controls what you’re exposed to? Tap a search into the search engine and there are typically millions of results, but Google puts them in order (based on goodness knows what) so there’s very little prospect of you discovering stuff which Google places well down the list. Million short is a new search engine that attempts to address this.  It enables users to remove up to the first 1,000,000 most popular results in order to make browsing the web more surprising and give the underdog a fighting chance.

After installing Million Short, users can simply select how many of the top results – anything from 100 to 1,000,000 – they want to discount, and then search as usual.  Search results will then be displayed, along with details about which sites have been excluded. If the user spots a link they want to see, they can still access it.

Perhaps you might to give this a try, or maybe it will give you a little inspiration and encouragement. If there’s a desirable alternative to something as big as Google, there have to be viable alternatives to the ‘big boys’ in your market.

Website: https://millionshort.com/

As we’ve said many times here before, the great thing about a subscription based business is that it provides continuity of income. The box subscription concept is becoming increasingly popular, and can be applied to many markets. Customers pay a monthly subscription, and in return receive a box of ‘goodies’ each month, specially selected for them on the basis of  either their regular usage patterns or their stated preferences.

We’ve seen this business model applied to tea, coffee, chocolates, beauty supplies, specialist foods, dog treats, vitamins and razor blades to name but a few.  So what else could you try? The key points  to bear in mind are that suitable products should be consumable, relatively low priced and cheap and easy to deliver.