So, how do you develop your own Big Marketing Ideas?
It all begins by first recognizing… Big Marketing Ideas don’t come to you in a flash of inspiration.
They’re not based on your creativity… pulled from your psyche. They’re not simply going to pop into your head. No.
Big Marketing Ideas are discovered and developed.
They come from digging into the market and product. From research.
Eugene Schwartz said it best:
“You don’t get an idea or a headline. You dig it out of the market research. You wring it out of your product. You read. You listen. You experiment. The creativity is not in you. It’s in your market. It’s in your prospects. It’s in your product. All you’re doing is joining the two together.”
This is why, when it comes to research, legendary advertising copywriter, John Caples, said:
“You should collect 7 times the amount of information you think you’re going to need…”
And all-star copywriter, Gary Bencivenga, said:
“Research with a hand-truck. You can never have too much information…”
And Brian Kurtz, former VP of Boardroom Inc., said:
“Be a bloodhound…”
Finding Big Marketing Ideas begins with deep digging.
And, when digging and doing your research, you need to consume lots of information.
You need lots of ideas. And to get lots of ideas, you need lots of input.
This is why the idea of a marketer not reading a variety of diverse books and magazines… not watching the news… not watching popular movies or television shows… not reading general information as well as market-specific information… is absurd.
Marketers that foolishly limit their sources of information are limiting their input. And, by limiting their input, they’re limiting their potential output of ideas.
In order to come up with lots of ideas, you must have a lot of input. And you must have a lot of input and a lot of ideas in order to find and develop a Big Marketing Idea.
Remember: The whole process for finding and developing a Big Marketing Idea is all about discovery and assembly. Both come from your volume of input.
So what are ideas?
Well, an idea is nothing more than a new combination of old, common, seemingly disconnected elements.
Finding seeds of great ideas is about looking for new or unusual combinations and/or connections between two or three different things that are seemingly disconnected.
It’s you seeing a new or unusual connection between two or more seemingly disconnected items.
And, as James Webb Young shares in his fantastic little book A Technique For Producing Ideas:
“The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends on your ability to see relationships.”
Now, you might not be a natural at this. But, the beautiful thing is… the ability to see relationships where others don’t is a skill set that can be developed like any other skillset.
In his book, Young references the idea of being either a renter or a speculator — a concept first presented by Wilfredo Pareto, the Italian sociologist behind the 80/20 principle.
Rentiers are people who view different elements as separate, disconnected bits of information. They go about life not looking for, or seeing, connections. Then you’ve got speculators. These people are preoccupied with the possibility of connections.
They view elements not as totally separate, but as another link in the same chain.
They’re constantly on the lookout for possible combinations and connections.
How is A like or connected to B?
You need to begin to function as a speculator.
Speculator comes from Latin “speculari” which means to spy out and observe.
Proactively, intentionally looking for relationships between things that rentiers ignore as being disconnected.
That’s how you’ll begin to strengthen your idea muscle. And how you’ll develop the skillset of seeing combinations where others do not.
Now, to have the correct input to find these connections there are two different types of information you should be consuming.
There’s specific information which is related to your product… related to your prospect… and related to your market in general.
And there’s general information related to what’s on the forefront of people’s minds (i.e. current events). Ideas come from a new combination of specific knowledge about your product and prospect, along with general knowledge about the mainstream issues on the market’s mind.
This is why it’s important for you to consume a variety of general information along with specific information related to your product and marketplace.
Some various sources, just to get your wheels spinning: books, magazines, newspapers, news programs, forums, Amazon comments, blog articles, blog comments, professional trade journals, Facebook groups, podcasts, radio programs, YouTube, history, other experts’ content, past marketing promotions, etc.
While consuming, digging, and researching, you’re looking for seeds of ideas you haven’t heard before.
Things shared with a different perspective. An interesting, curious nugget. A twist on an old idea. A weird fact.
You want to find things that get your juices flowing. Something which piques your own curiosity. Something which gets you excited… and excited to tell others about it. And when you’re researching, don’t pre-judge any idea or nugget.
Don’t start making decisions about whether it’s good or not while researching. Just note it. Document every idea that strikes your fancy.
When possible, also note proof points along the way.
Remember, promises and claims are cheap. They’re brushed-off without proof.
There’s no value in an idea if there’s no proof to back it up. So, when researching, note proof points. Also, when you’re developing your ideas, don’t be afraid to explore ideas that are outrageous, controversial, or polarizing.
You can’t be afraid to ruffle feathers. You can’t be afraid to say something that’s going to polarize you in the eyes of your market. And you can’t be afraid to say something that’s slightly embarrassing.
You’ve got to be willing to go big.
Remember, you’re not looking for an idea that’ll tap your prospect on the shoulder.
You’re looking for an idea that’ll whack them on the side of the head.
And don’t rush things. You need to be patient when researching and looking for seeds of a Big Marketing Idea.
Give yourself the time and room to find interesting stuff and flesh it out. Don’t rush ahead with an idea unless you feel you have something you’re excited about.
Even the guys over at Agora are only required to come up with 6 Big Marketing Ideas per year… 1 every 8 weeks… They aim to spend around 5-6 weeks alone on digging their Big Marketing Idea.
Spend the majority of your time sharpening the axe (aka your BMI).
The writing part should be the easiest part.
The hardest part — the thing that will make your promotion succeed or fail — is going to be this idea of taking the ordinary and turning it into the extraordinary.
To make sure you have clarity, you should be able, to sum up, your Big Marketing Idea in a concise statement that’s simple and powerful.
You must be able to articulate your idea in under 30 seconds.
Imagine you’re at a social gathering and you want to run your idea by a friend to see if they would find it interesting and compelling. You wouldn’t take a half-hour. You wouldn’t take 20 minutes. And you wouldn’t rattle off some headline. You’d share the idea as quickly and clearly as possible and wait for their response. And what you’d be hoping for is, “Wow, tell me more about that.”
If you can’t sum-up your idea in under 30 seconds, odds are you don’t have clarity yet. And you need to spend more time thinking about it and developing it.
So read a lot.
Read more than anybody else you know. Watch more than anyone you know. I think everybody should watch a TED Talk a day, too. I think if you watch TED Talk a day, there are multiple ideas, and all the TED Talks are so forward-looking for the good ones.
So you consume as much in the input as you possibly can.
You read everything. Everything like that.
Step No. 2 is you forget about it and you let those ideas have sex in your head.
So idea # 1 starts to have sex with idea # 2 right?
You watch a TED Talk about a new biomarker that diagnoses cancer early, and it starts to have sex with one of these promos that you read two weeks ago.
And then step No. 3 is you come out with an idea, a “baby idea,” after the sex.
The baby idea is a combination of two other ideas that have been having sex in your head.
You want both specific knowledge and general knowledge.
You want to build specific knowledge about whatever project you are working on. But you always have to be building that general knowledge out there for everything. And you don’t want to be too much of a nerd, I guess.
Where you are only talking about your niche. I mean you have to have a broad mind.
For example:
If you are writing a promotion about corporate bonds, you would want to get every piece of information you can find about corporate bonds.
Where they came from. The history of them. The ad story behind the publication. B
ut then there is that piece of general knowledge, which is your permission to be curious about everything.
And that is where you just randomly gather information wherever you can.
It can come from anything from books you are reading about the financial markets to watching TV cable shows. Or watching movies or popular entertainment.
Sales Detective
So as a sales detective, you now have the right to use all the legal means to discover or learn whatever you need to do to find big ideas.
Whenever you see a hint of what could be a big idea, use all legal means to try to track down every piece of information you can find on it.
One final and important note about Big Marketing Ideas: They exist within a context, within a point in time.
What was a Big Marketing Idea three months ago may not be a Big Marketing Idea today.
Likely, what was a Big Marketing Idea a year ago is certainly not a Big Marketing Idea today.
Sometimes ideas have a very limited window. Some weeks. Others, months. Rarely, years.
Why?
Because things change. Your prospects evolve. What was once new is now old. What was once unique is now run-of-the-mill. So, you never want to copy or steal an old idea.
You shouldn’t be stealing anybody’s idea, to begin with, but it’s to your detriment if you do because they all exist within a context. And likely, that context has changed.
Your aim is to develop something new and fresh. Something timely. Something unique. Something your prospects have never heard before.
Something arresting. And it needs to be Emotionally Compelling and Intellectually Interesting. Something that prods your prospect’s heart and head. Their feelings and their logic.
When you’re patient… and you develop that type of idea — a Big Marketing Idea — you’ll then possess the foundation of what can be turned into a very powerful and very profitable marketing campaign.
It’s not easy.
And it won’t happen quickly. But the payoff can be incredible!
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