The world needs wild ideas. But every wild idea faces a road of obstacles to bring it to life. The hard work comes after the brainstorming rumpus when you have to bring others along. Few of these obstacles are as rough as the devil’s advocate. IDEO founder Tom Kelley once called the devil’s advocate the single greatest threat to innovation: [...]
There has never been a greater level of marketing clutter. Yankelovich Consumer Research charts that “we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 marketing messages a day back in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 a day today.” At the same time, marketing communication is often little more than a string of adjectives: bigger, better, faster, cheaper, etc. So [...]
One of my favorite idea killers is the statement, “if it were really a good idea, someone would already be doing it.” In innovation, we often fixate too much on the competition. We benchmark and validate ideas based what everyone else is doing. This cycle of one-upmanship makes it hard to launch something truly new and different. It also creates [...]
Should campaigns be media-driven or idea-driven? Lately, it feels like the media tail is wagging the campaign dog. Many campaigns are built around a media platform, as if the media platform alone was the big idea. Most of the Foursquare campaigns I see feel like that. Sometimes marketers forget that media platforms are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the [...]
Every time I buy a new technology product, I wonder how long it will last. I salivate over anything new from Apple. But, I’ve had a number of Apple products fail recently. My Apple Time Capsule, marketed as a “revolutionary storage device”, died after just two years, unfixable, losing all the files it was designed to store. My two-year old [...]
Mobile is the next frontier for marketing. Not all mobile marketing is spam, of course, but many current campaigns feature exactly that — unwanted, unsolicited SMS text messages. The potential of mobile marketing is far more powerful — location-specific, time-based, highly personalized messaging. It has the potential to offer real utility to consumers. But the current state seems more geared [...]
The gamification bandwagon continues, promising customer engagement and loyalty. What some marketers miss is that gamification means a lot more than badges, points, mayorships, and leader boards. Those game mechanics don’t necessarily create experiences worth playing. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. More importantly, gamification can’t make an un-engaging brand engaging. It may be the shiny new thing, [...]
We all know the IDEO maxim, “Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner”. Rapid prototyping is a key principle of successful innovation. The sooner we make prototypes, the sooner we figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what to make in the next prototype. Yet marketers are quicker to PowerPoint than to prototype. We spend more time on two-by-two matrixes and venn diagrams [...]
I gave a talk this week on 5 ways to overcome idea killers. Brainjuicer partnered with Deutsch in Los Angeles to put on “Invent Fest”, a thought-provoking day on how we bring ideas to life. In my talk, I argued that coming up with ideas is relatively easy. The hard work comes after the flip charts are put away at [...]
It is a lot easier to kill an idea than to create one. Groups are often better equipped to critique than to create. I was struck by a recent NY Times article on the challenges of group creativity: “The Rise of the New Groupthink“: “Decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and [...]
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