Trade Your Dirty Laundry for Computer Games

LANdry was recently launched by Samsung in Sweden. The idea behind it is that you can get more teenagers to wash their clothes with a special kind of incentive.

Here’s how it works: When you come to the laundromat, you’re handed a Samsung Galaxy smartphone to use as a timer. The timer is automatically connected to one of the brand’s washing machines. After you load up and start your laundry, you’re then allowed to use one of the high-speed gaming computers for as long as you have clothes in the wash. The more you wash, the longer you can play. And once the laundry’s done, your game automatically stops -- so there’s extra incentive to do so many loads as possible.

It’s a clever idea, and it follows a trend that we’ve been tracking at Mindshare, called First World Problems, First World Pleasures.

The small irritations or mini-pleasures can make or break your day. Like when you don’t have enough memory on your phone to snap a photo of something great, so you frantically start deleting files. Or that moment of joy when you reach the 11th like on Instagram, which means that all the names under your photo condense to only show the number 11.

Technology has created all sorts of moments like these, and it has changed consumer expectations along with them. For marketers, you should find ways that your brand can help people with these pains or give them moments of joy.

At the very least, we’re bound to see some very neatly dressed teenagers in Sweden.

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