The opportunity: Encourage traders to talk with passion about TradingView to their friendship groups.
What I did: pitched and co-created a luxury, limited edition Swiss watch which accurately depicts the stock market opens and closes.
The results: Sold out in under 24 hours. Now retailing with a 500%+ mark-up on the secondary market.
Further reading
A few years ago, I wrote a post for the American Advertising Association about a concept I’d been developing called Radical Intrinsic Value. I’d been inspired by Plato, who nearly 2,500 years ago had first proposed the concept of intrinsic value, the idea that some things are ‘valuable,’ independent of their perceived value by individuals.
A radio is extrinsically valuable, we use it as a tool to get to something, for example listening to Tschaikowsky. But Tschaikowsky’s music itself is intrinsically valuable, it seems to have worth in-of-itself, even if we subjectively don’t like classical music. I became fascinated by the idea that some businesses were actually using some of this philosophy to create brands that seem to have intrinsic value beyond the mere tools they sell, Apple being a prime example.
Using a sequence of reasoning Plato himself might approve of, I postulated that if you took Intrinsic Value to its extreme, honing in on specific objective values that resonate with your target audience and then amplifying those values to the max, you would create highly engaging talk triggers that would virally be shared throughout the target consumer group.
How could this apply to TradingView customers? The trader’s entire worldview is governed by the concept of manmade time, that is, the breaking up of chronological order of events into neat little packages we call seconds, days, weeks, months, year. They watch as markets open and close, as candlesticks form and fall, as quarterly earnings are announced, and as year to date charts progress. The entirety of human economic activity is displayed for the traders in a rigid, homogenised structure of manmade time.
Concurrently, clocks and watches often act as memento mori, reminders that the seconds are ticking down, and that all of us will one day perish. It’s probably why watches have become such beacons of intrinsic value in their own right: little Swiss timepieces which are crafted with more care and attention to detail – and over a longer period of time – than it takes to redevelop an entire city district. They are our expensive tokens we wave in the air to show our affluence, and our freedom to cherish beautiful things before the end of all things.
The TradeTime is the rational conclusion to this line of logical thinking. Adding the market’s open and closes onto a watch was something that had never been done before, it’s eminently useful to traders who can see at a glance whether NYSE was about to open, it even took into account daylight savings time in the respective countries that adhere to it.
Most of all, it’s built to last, and will be a cherished talk trigger about TradingView for perhaps even longer than TradingView exists.
