LEGO's minifigure made new characters cheap with interchangeable parts
LEGO designer Jens Nygaard Knudsen made minifigures from interchangeable parts so new characters cost almost nothing to create.
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3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDPhilip Morris made Marlboro masculine by selling a cowboy, not a filter
Philip Morris hired Leo Burnett, who rebranded Marlboro's filtered cigarette with rugged cowboy imagery, making the filter irrelevant to men's perception.
Read the caseMaster Lock shot its own padlock to prove it was tough
Master Lock replaced a durability claim with a live rifle shot at its padlock, letting the visual proof sell toughness.
Read the caseMaytag advertised a repairman with nothing to fix
Maytag, an appliance maker, advertised a bored repairman with no calls to prove its machines rarely broke, inverting the category's service-speed ads.
Read the caseMetromile priced car insurance by the mile, not the driver
Metromile charged auto insurance per mile driven, so low-mileage drivers stopped subsidizing high-mileage ones and saved 47% on average.
Read the casePeloton sold the bike as a terminal, the class as the business
Peloton sold the bike as a one-time terminal and charged monthly for live classes, turning hardware into a customer-acquisition channel.
Read the caseUS War Production Board made drug rivals share penicillin secrets
In 1941, the US War Production Board made Merck, Pfizer, and Squibb share fermentation methods, boosting penicillin output 40-50x by 1945.
Read the casePlanet Fitness priced gym for people who won't come
Planet Fitness priced its base membership at $10 to keep occasional and non-attending members, making absence the profit margin.
Read the casePokémon TCG turned collecting into repeat purchases with randomized packs
Pokémon TCG made card collecting a repeat purchase by selling randomized packs with rare cards, not fixed sets.
Read the casePortugal sailed around spice middlemen
Portugal bypassed Venice's spice monopoly by sailing around Africa, controlling the new sea route directly.
Read the caseRed Bull built a space jump instead of running another ad
Red Bull, facing look-alike ads, produced and owned a record-breaking space jump, streaming it live to 8 million viewers.
Read the caseRedfin paid agents salaries and refunded buyers
Redfin paid agents salaries plus satisfaction bonuses, funded by software-raised productivity, and refunded savings to buyers.
Read the caseReserve Fund created money market funds to bypass deposit interest cap
Bent and Brown created a money market fund to bypass the deposit interest cap, letting small savers earn market rates with bank-like liquidity.
Read the caseRoku sold cheap boxes to build an installed base and toll every stream
Roku sold players near cost and licensed its OS free to TV makers to build an installed base, then monetized every hour streamed through content and ads.
Read the caseIdeal Toy Company turned the Rubik's Cube's difficulty into a global fad
Ideal Toy Company kept the Rubik's Cube's maddening difficulty, turning it into a global word-of-mouth phenomenon.
Read the caseSealed Air found Bubble Wrap's market shipping IBM computers
Sealed Air, after Bubble Wrap failed as wallpaper and insulation, sold it to IBM as cushioning for shipping fragile mainframes.
Read the caseSkyWest sold flying by the flight, not the ticket
SkyWest turned regional flying into a fixed-fee operations business, selling schedule reliability to major airlines instead of tickets to passengers.
Read the caseSnowflake charged per query, not per seat
Snowflake charged for compute consumed per query, not per seat, aligning cost with value.
Read the caseSpirit Airlines unbundled fares to undercut rivals and profit
Spirit Airlines unbundled airfares, charging a low base fare and separately for bags and seats, so light travelers paid less and margins stayed high.
Read the caseSquare gave merchants free card readers, kept the fees
Square gave free card readers to small merchants and charged a flat per-transaction fee, turning hardware into a toll gate.
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