Compete on Design

Compete on Design

John says that even your business model should illustrate competition based
in design.

This article making the rounds in todays media is a perfect example of
competing on design... selling fake vacations... very profitably. The info
below was part of a larger article on Russian counterfeiting, but the point
is well made for competing on business model design.

Malcolm

===============


Russians able to fake it like no one else
By Kim Murphy

Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW - Always wanted to brag to your friends about your trip to Brazil,
but couldn't afford to go? No problem.

For $500, nobody will believe you weren't sunning yourself last week on
Copacabana Beach, just before you trekked through the Amazon rain forest and
slept in a thatched hut. Hey! That's you, arms outstretched like Kate
Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, on top of Corcovado.

Persey Tours barely was keeping bill collectors at bay before it started
offering fake vacations last year. Now it's selling 15 a month - providing
ersatz ticket stubs, hotel receipts, photos with clients' images
superimposed on famous landmarks, and a few souvenirs for living-room
shelves.

If the customer is an errant husband who wants his wife to believe he's on a
fishing trip, Persey offers not only photos of him on the river, but a
cellphone with a distant number, a few dead fish on ice and a lodge that -
if anyone calls - will swear the husband is checked in but not available.

Dmitry Popov, founder and chief executive of Persey Tours, made $2,000 last
year helping a Siberian gas-station owner convince his friends that he had
rented a ride on the Russian space shuttle to the moon.

"Of course he was smiling when he ordered this," Popov said. "But he paid."

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