Selling Ice to the Eskimos ??? Or Water to Fools

It would be hard as selling ice to an Eskimo, a well known old saying,  and it would no doubt be even more difficult than it sounds. After all, the Eskimos have lots of ice so why would they buy more.  I spent several years in sales and often selling a product could be tough, the competition was tough, one had to have a good case for why their product was worth buying. Some items sold better than others, some times demand was good but mostly the product depended on a good marketing gimmick . An item that comes to mind that should be very difficult or even impossible to sell is water, well maybe not if you were in the desert!  Who would have bought water twenty or thirty years ago?. Today bottled water is sold everywhere and it is not cheap. The amazing thing about selling water is the marketing gimmick. The thin plastic bottle looks good and the water seems to sparkle through the clear plastic. Often we see ads of very attractive young slim female jogger/athletes holding or sometimes actually drinking from one of these plastic bottles. It screams health, fitness, refreshing, cool and thirst quenching. Its amazing to see people in super markets buying it by the case, it is available in corner stores, service stations, restaurants, planes trains and probably buses. No one would have believed it would be possible to sell water a few decades ago. Indeed I find it hard to believe  in 2015, and why shouldn’t I, I can have a drink of good clean water from the tap in my kitchen. Yet we have probably one of the most successful marketing strategies maybe the most successful in the last one hundred years. My parents would never have considered buying water no matter how fancy a bottle. I never buy water because it just doesn’t make sense. I understand when in a crisis such as flooding or contamination bottled water is a good and necessary item. But most of the time we are not in a crisis but people still buy water by the bucket load. The one issue and its a very serious one, is pollution caused by these little healthy looking plastic bottles. There are millions of them discarded every day, they are dumped on the beaches and in the oceans. They litter the ditches along our highways, in camp sites and rivers, sports fields and in forests. It has been estimated there are enough of these little bottles to form a chain to reach around the globe. And at this point folks, they neither look good or healthy, just more destructive pollution for the World to handle!!! God Bless and keep reading