Is three the magic number?

About seven or eight years ago, I remember noticing a trend in how products were marketed. Everything had to be EXTREME, XTREME, or just X. There was extreme yogurt, extreme Gatorade, extreme toothpaste . They even turned the regular Boflex into the Boflex xtreme. It seemed that every commercial that was advertising a product mentioned something about how extreme it was.

Airheads Xtremes - Raspberry

Right Guard Xtreme - Roller Derby

I could go on for ever, but I would rather just get to the point. While there are still companies who use the term "extreme" in their products, I believe that a new selling point has emerged. And quite honestly, it's absolutely genius. It follows the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle which makes it so effective. If you haven't figured it out from the title, it's the idea of 3 easy steps, or a series of 3, where all you need to do is go from the step 1 to step 2 to step 3. Here are some examples...



skip to 1:00min




It only seems fit for this to start at this point in time when people want things to be simple and easy. And what could be easier than counting to three. But the number three seems to be everywhere these days...the hat-trick (soccer or hockey), the "three-peat", and even "the big three" (although they did not look to hot in game 1). Even ESPN has recently announced "ESPN 3". I'm not really sure where I go from here, but it's just interesting how companies have evolved their products.

Oh and one more thing, I would have put the link for the ESPN 3 commercial up however the large amount of time spent looking for it resulted in complete failure. So I turned to the Giant for help, because he can literally find ANYTHING on the Internet, except for this. This means one of two things, Duncs may not be the best at using the Internet OR I'm completely delusional and living in a "Shutter Island" world and the ESPN 3 commercial doesn't exist. But if someone can find it, let me know so I can eliminate the latter from being true.

Have a good summer break everyone.