Technology Advantage in the Space Age |

The Space Race of the 1950s and 1960s was about establishing technological superiority.

Shortly after entering space, American astronauts discovered that their ball-point pens wouldn’t work in zero gravity. This was awful. Without them, they couldn’t complete checklists or record the results of scientific experiments.

NASA brought its best minds to bear on the problem.

The best and the brightest that America had to offer worked frantically to find a solution before the Russians did. They worked almost around the clock.

After four years and expenditures of over $12 million, NASA engineers finally came up with a pen that had a pressurized ink well.

Photo courtesy of NASA

It could write in zero gravity…

It could write upside down…

It could even write under water!

Meanwhile Russian cosmonauts, who had encountered the very same problem upon their first foray into space, simply used pencils.

The above is a joke but it illustrates an important point.

Too often we make things more complicated than they have to be.

The best solution is often one that’s elegantly simple.

The same applies to your marketing.

Sometimes you need an expensive, complex solution. After all, we couldn’t have made it to the moon without first building a rocketship. For that we needed a team of smart engineers and expenditures of large amounts of resources.

Other times, the solution can be far less complex and still get the job done.

A good marketer is also a guide to help you determine what’s needed and what’s possible.

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The Space Race of the 1950s and 1960s was about establishing technological superiority.