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•Nine Greatest Selling Innovations 13

respectability to the shops and products and encouraged women to think more lib-
erally about sex and sensuality.

It works like this. Someone volunteers to house a party and invite as many of
her friends and their friends to attend. There are drinks and games as well as a
presentation of the Ann Summers product range and the usual product party invita-
tion to buy. There are 7500 party organisers who do the presentations and more
than 2 million ladies attend in a year. In the lead-up to the Christmas period some
4500 parties are held in a week.

I am told that an Ann Summers party is ‘brilliant fun’ and anyone who has been
to one reports spending a lot of the time roaring with laughter. That’s all I know
about them because men are barred from attending. Quite right too: men would
probably make the parties quiet and sad.

‘Party spirit, which, at best, is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.’
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

Idea 7 – A non-trivial marketing campaign

The Trivial Pursuit game was conceived on 15 December 1979, when photo editor
Chris Haney got together with sportswriter Scott Abbott over a brand new game of
Scrabble. The fact that they kept losing Scrabble tiles meant that it was their eighth
brand new game of Scrabble.

Sensing a business opportunity (well, if every household had eight sets of
Scrabble), they decided to invent a new game. They were, of course, newspeople by
profession, so the theme was current events. The questions all dealt with the 5 Ws –
who, what, when, where and why. To begin with they called it ‘Trivia Pursuit’ until
Chris’s wife called it ‘Trivial Pursuit.’ which they preferred.

With somewhat naïve entrepreneurial zeal they formed a company. They per-
suaded Chris’s brother John Haney and his friend Ed Werner to join and borrowed
money from everyone they knew. One of the original 34 investors was a copyboy