Sen Ze’s Business In Your Pajamas! Blog

Simplicity is good.

A simple to use and understand product that is also easy to create is like a god-send.

Your Prospects and Customers can easily buy it without having to spend too much time figuring out what it is that you’re trying to sell.

It’s a good thing for you because it’s very easy for you to create that product for them too.

Take the “American Idol” singing competition (it’s a “business” for its producers), for example.

It’s a singing contest, and the winner is determined by the number of SMS votes that he/she has received, with the contestant having the lowest number of votes being booted out at the end of each episode.

Simple. Easy. And a super-hit.

If you were producing this program, all you need to do is to determine the format of the competition (how many songs, how long for each song, how many to start off with, etc), decide how many judges would participate, decide who they are to be, decide the date and venues for the auditions, set up the phones lines, deal with the network, find the sponsors, and so on.

Those are not rocket-science stuff. There may be many things that need to be done, but they’re simple stuff that anybody with the right experience can do.

And so American Idol began its huge money-making journey and has done so for the past 6 seasons now, with the 7th underway.

Now “American Idol” is a franchise of “Pop Idol” which began in the UK.

Before long, many countries bought the franchise and started having their own “Idol” competition on television. It’s hard to miss the “Idol” phenomenon everywhere you go.

However, because the show itself isn’t difficult to create, it wasn’t long before copycat versions of it started. This has resulted in the “Idol” competition no longer being held with the copycat version taking the spotlight instead, with a different label, different number of judges, different format for the competition, but always ending with SMS votes determining the winner.

Some other countries never bought the franchise, but borrowed the idea and started their own version right from the beginning using all sorts of label except “Idol”.

Simplicity is bad.

(For the “Idol” franchise, that is.)

Sen Ze

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