Grab a pencil and place it in front of you.
I want you to look at that pencil.
(If you are all out of pencils, just create a mental image of one.)
Why?
Because I want to prove to you that even the most seemingly mundane products or services contain useful, engaging, inspiring stories and content.
You just need to set them free.
Consider our pencil.
How much could you possibly write about this everyday object?
The possibilities are endless.
The pencil is pregnant with content just waiting to be born.
(As we proceed, think about how these might apply to your products, service or content)
We could start with the HISTORY of the pencil…
The pencil as we know it goes back to the early 16th century when a large deposit of graphite was first discovered in Cumbria.
Incidentally there is a pencil museum in Keswick (which was featured in the black comedy Sightseers).
We could REVIEW and offer COMPARISONS of the major manufacturers such as Faber-Castell, Steadtler, and my personal favourite Palomino.
Indeed, there are people who rank the relative merits of the greatest pencils in history against each other.
If you are interested, the top 5 are
- Palomino Blackwing 602
- General’s Cedar Pointe #333-1
- Palomino Blackwing 24
- Mitsubishi 9850 HB
- Caran d’Ache Swiss Wood 348 HB
I could easily write 5,000 words or more on the merits of the Blackwing 602.
But that’s for another time.
What about the design, MATERIALS and MANUFACTURING PROCESS of a pencil?
Most pencils are basically the same, aren’t they?
Oh, no…. Pencils come in many different guises.
The casing (wooden bit) can be round, hexagonal or triangular (more accurately the Reuleaux Triangle).
Carpenter’s pencils are oval, to stop them from rolling off a surface.
And you would not believe quite how much could be written about the different grades of pencil…
Most of us know that they can be graded 6h to 6b.
But Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth (a Czech pencil manufacturer whose name was inspired by the diamond in the Crown jewels) had pencils with 20 grades 10H – 8B.
Mitsubishi Pencils had 22 grades – from 10H – 10B!
Surely sharpening a pencil can’t generate that much interesting content…
Well…
Apart from the huge number of different types of sharpeners begging to be reviewed and compared.
A little bit of searching and you’ll come across a gently mocking book (and series of videos) dedicated to the art (and science) of artisanal pencil sharpening!
As far as I can tell this is a clever bit of viral marketing done by favoured pencil brand Palomino.
And we haven’t even mentioned coloured pencils….
I mean where do you start?
There are water colour… water-soluable… and pastel pencils…
And those mindfulness colouring books are another content rabbit hole that you could go down…
What about colouring in TECHNIQUES?
Of course, some prospects/customers take their pencil skills very seriously and will be keen to take their skills to the next level…
In that case, what are the best online and offline courses, books, videos, experts?
And maybe these customers would like to hook up with other likeminded pencil connoisseurs (COMMUNITY)… or share their stories and tips with others (USER GENERATED CONTENT).
How about finding out pencil NEWS, FACTS and STATS and RESOURCES…
Or a bit of TRIVIA…
For example, did you know there is no lead in a ‘lead’ pencil?
It’s graphite.
But people did get lead poisoning from pencils…
Sounds like some Agatha Christie MYSTERY…
The answer is through sucking the end of a pencil – it was the paint that actually contained lead!
Of course we all love a bit of CELEBRITY GOSSIP these days, so how about looking at all the famous pencil users.
John Steinbeck used up to 60 pencils per day!
- Edison had 3 inch pencils made especially for him so it would fit in his top pocket – easy access for making notes
- Roald Dahl only ever used yellow-cased pencils and had 6 sharpened ready when he was writing
I’m only scratching the surface here.
And to prove, beyond any doubt, that the pencil (or any product or service) contains potentially unlimited content that can be extracted and shared with your prospects and customers, let me leave you with the words of Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman was not only half the inspiration for naming Milton Keynes (FACT), but was also a Nobel Prize winning economist.
In 1980, Friedman presented his vision of how the free market might bring about world peace in a PBS broadcast TV series called Free to Choose.
In it he reduces his argument into a parable about a common household object.
Yes, you guess it, our pencil!
Here’s what he said:
“Look at this lead pencil.
“There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil.
Remarkable statement? Not at all.
The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington.
To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel.
To make steel, it took iron ore.
This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America.
This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native!
It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government.
This brass ferrule?
I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from.
Or the yellow paint!
Or the paint that made the black lines.
Or the glue that holds it together.
Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil.
People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met!
When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people.
What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil?
There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office.
It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.
That is why the operation of the free market is so essential.
Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.”
So the next time you or one of your writers need inspiration for content…
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