Rafflesia

Rafflesia produces the world's largest single flower - up to 3 feet across - which smells like rotting meat. This corpse-mimicking strategy attracts carrion flies and beetles that normally feed on dead animals. The flies enter the flower expecting a meal, find none, but carry pollen to the next Rafflesia they're deceived by. This is pollination through false advertising.

The plant's extreme strategy matches its extreme lifestyle. Rafflesia has no leaves, stems, or roots - it lives entirely inside Tetrastigma vine hosts, visible only when flowering. The enormous flower is the only part that emerges. The plant invested everything in a single, spectacular deceptive signal rather than ordinary vegetative structures.

Rafflesia's dependence extends beyond pollinators to hosts. Without Tetrastigma vines, there's no Rafflesia - the 'plant' is actually more like a fungus, surviving as threads inside another organism. This double dependence - on specific hosts and on carrion fly pollinators fooled by rotting smell - makes Rafflesia conservation exceptionally difficult.

The business insight is that deception-based strategies require ongoing novelty. Carrion flies don't learn to avoid Rafflesia flowers because they encounter them rarely. If Rafflesia were common, flies might learn the deception and avoid it. Companies that compete through misleading marketing face similar constraints - the strategy works when novel but degrades when familiar. Deception has diminishing returns.