Romance enhancer is all marketing.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Small Biz

RECENTLY I RETURNED FROM A WEEKEND IN STEAMBOAT Springs not only feeling relaxed and refreshed, but with a sharpened sense of how important marketing is in business, especially if the product being marketed is nearly worthless. (The grandaddy of all such offers being brine shrimp--tiny eggs or larvae that hatch when placed in water--brilliantly re-purposed and repackaged as trainable pets called Sea Monkeys that used to be advertised in the back of Boys Life.) Some-what along those lines, I also returned from my Steamboat weekend with an exciting new product idea. Let me explain what sparked the brainstorm:

On our first morning in this splendid high-altitude town, having spent a romantic evening at a condo near the base of Mount Werner, my girlfriend and I noticed a "two-hour parallel parking" sign as we walked along the main street. Except this sign had been doctored, probably by kids, so that it read: "Two hour parallel pOrking."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I couldn't help but laugh, especially considering the unlikelihood of an altered sign like that lasting even five minutes in downtown Steamboat, with all the cops patrolling the streets.

But then I put on my business editor's cap, and a light went on. "We're 7,300 feet above sea level!" I reminded my girlfriend, while I pointed specifically to the "two hour" part of the altered sign. "Even 25 minutes of 'parallel pOrking' at 7,300 feet would take an hour to recover from--if not kill you."

Not that I find the doctoring of that "parking" sign and what it connotes offensive. Are you kidding? The way we're bombarded on TV and radio every five minutes with ads for Viagra, Cialis, Levitra and Enzyte, to name a few?

As a guy in the communications business, what irritates me are not the ads or their frequency, but the nebulous, nearly indecipherable visual and/or verbal euphemisms these ads use to try to describe their products.

For example, in one TV ad a man gets a Levitra prescription, and suddenly he can throw a football through a tire swing, whereas before taking Levitra he was lucky if he could hit the side of the tire.

Huh?

This brings us to my new product idea. But first a little background: A few years ago I attended a venture-capital forum in Denver in which one of the five-minute pitches by startups was from a company called CAT--Colorado Altitude Training. The company's chief product was a tent that fit over your bed that simulated high altitude--a bit of oxygen reduction, it sounded...