I have a fairly simple idea that I’d like to promote for businesses adopt.
My desire is to offer the idea for free (which I am doing here), with the stipulation that it NOT be patented (though I’m pretty sure it can’t) nor copywrited so it would be available to all Co.’s.
The idea is:
Gas price signs at gas stations that are a ‘pole’ (about 2 feet diameter) w/ the prices crawl / ticker around the pole – so readable from 360 degrees.
For clarity; I mean crawl / ticker like the New York Times (Times Tower) at One Times Square in New York City.
Here’s a picture of a ticker: File:Reuters News Ticker.jpg - Wikipedia
You’re set already. Just go around telling people. You don’t have to do anything else.
As you pointed out in your own post, other people already have actual devices like the one you want to promote. You’re not in any position to patent or abstain from patenting them. You don’t need anyone’s permission to suggest an idea to a gas station.
As Fuzzy said, you just go and tell people. The problem with the idea is that it’s going to be very expensive. Beginning to end, it’s probably going to cost the store owner something like $50,000. Probably considerably more if it’s 360 degrees. A regular, two sided, LED board tends to run about $20,000. This board, assuming it uses regular panels, is going to be bigger and require a metal worker to hand make the trim and brackets to go around it. It’s also got the big disadvantage of the gas prices moving around whereas the regular signs just keep the stationary and make the easy to read as you’re driving past them at 30 or 40MPH.
But, yeah, just tell people your idea. Maybe show them that picture or mock up a sketch.
To take it up a notch, mock up a sketch of how it would look on their existing pole in front of their building. That’s what sign makers do now. They take a picture of your property and then when you get the quote back for your new sign it shows you what the new sign looks like on your property.
The next step after that would be to ‘sell/pitch’ your idea to the sign makers. Since they’re the ones who would be making the signs and doing the actual selling and have a direct line with the people who actually want signs.
If you came in my store and started talking, it would go in one ear and out the other, but if I were actively thinking about getting a new sign, I’d be talking to sign makers and maybe one of them would have talked to you.
If you want to make your message compelling, you need to offer more than the idea. Business owners are bombarded by all kinds of ideas and they don’t have the time, budget or energy to pursue all of them. To convince them that yours is worth it, you need to offer some kind of evidence that it works. For example, if you owned four gas stations and found that ticker signs increased sales by 10%… well, that’s pretty compelling.
Once you have a compelling idea, you need a place where decision-makers will find it. A forum like this might catch a few people, but how many gas-station owners are here? You’d do better to pitch your message as a seminar at the gas station industry annual conference or the sign-maker’s national trade show.
The problem with this idea in particular is that many customers are going to be like me. We expect gas prices to be displayed in a particular way in a particular place. I would only look at an LED ticker after looking everywhere else and thinking “Where the f— are their prices?!”
Ditto. I wonder why you think it is insufficient to have the sign readable both from this direction and from that direction. Your idea might help where several roads all meet at the same place, so that cars are facing the station at varied angles, but in such a situation it would probably be difficult to get to your particular corner, unless I was already on a convenient road, in which case again the regular two-sided sign would suffice.
It does have style and originality points though. Marketing is a powerful thing especially when you are dealing with basic commodities like gas stations. I am sure some of the fancier gas stations/mini-marts are willing to spend money to enhance their “curb appeal” and high-tech displays are a good way to do that. There is a reason why Manhattan and Las Vegas are filled with different versions of them. $50,000 is a lot but it isn’t THAT expensive especially if you can show either a decrease in labor cost or increase in sales from it.
High-volume gas stations that offer slightly cheaper gas than most of their nearby competitors would probably love a new way to flash that message to the masses. They could even add messages that say it is the cheapest gas in town assuming that is true that day.
