Pet Rock Inventor Dies

What was the best, most clever and successful marketing idea of a product that was so ordinary that selling it seemed to appeal only to the most shallow of the world's patrons?  For me it as the "pet rock". Gary Ross Dahl, the creator of the 1970s fad the Pet Rock, has died at age 78 in southern Oregon. Gary Ross Dahl, the creator of the strangely popular 1970s fad the Pet Rock, has died at age 78 in southern Oregon.

In case you are not familiar with the pet rock, it was a small smooth stone packed in a cardboard box containing a tongue-in-cheek instruction pamphlet for "care and feeding." People gobbled them up as fast a free donuts are scooped off a tray.  Dahl estimated he had sold 1.5 million of them at roughly $4 each by the time the fad died. The Pet Rock required no work and no time commitment in an age when that is almost as important as a quality filled relationship. Uh, no! I swear I never bought a pet rock.

Dahl was an intuitive guy, an advertising executive when he came up with the Pet Rock idea. He also wrote "Advertising for Dummies." And in 2000, he was a grand prize winner in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for dreadful prose. His winning line is the forgettable, "The heather encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land's end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints."

But there was a down side to the Pet Rock idea. According to Dahl  people would come to him with weird ideas, expecting him to do for them what he had done for himself. A stupid idea, like the pet Rock, becomes a clever one when it markets itself to the attack a sacred idea in society, as in the idea that we sometimes treat our real pets with more attention and care than we so out human children. But the ideas Dahl had to listen to, he claimed, were nothing more than really, really stupid ideas. And as late as the early 90's, Dahl said he had avoided interviews because of what he called "a bunch of wackos" appearing out of nowhere with threats and lawsuits.

He once said,  "Sometimes I look back and wonder if my life wouldn't have been simpler if I hadn't done it."
Dahl's wife says she plans to sprinkle his ashes in the Pacific Ocean where he can, I guess, lay with the pet ocean shells.