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Creative ideas never happen for a variety of reasons.

“We have procedures and policies in place to tell us what to do.”

“The big decisions get made by somebody else.”

“Everything is fine the way it is.”

“You just have to keep your head down and do your job.”

“We need to get this done right now – no questions asked.”

“We’ve got all the resources we’re going to get.”

“Just do what works.”

“We only need one good idea.”

“That’s easier said than done.”

“I have no idea how we’re doing.”

How many of these ten reasons things don’t change have you heard the last week? How many of them have you said . . . or thought?

How many times have these eighty-plus words – these 10 reasons things don’t change –killed creative ideas when things really DID need to change? Maybe change dramatically?

Can you blow up whichever of these ten reasons things don’t change is stopping you from what you need to do?

Can you do the blowing up today? – Mike Brown

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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It’s one thing for a retail store to implement a program making the brand experience easier, more convenient, and a greater value for a specific customer segment. But when the program degrades the retail brand experience for higher margin customers and causes employee to act as if these customers are less trustworthy? Then, the program is a problem.

The retail store is Walmart, and the program is the Walmart Ad Match Guarantee. That’s where they will match a competitor’s advertised price on the same item at Walmart.

On the surface, the Ad Match Guarantee is a great value enhancement strategy: it makes it convenient for bargain hunting customers to do all their shopping at Walmart while grabbing the greater value for certain items at other retailers. It obviously has revenue benefits for Walmart since it’s not splitting a customer’s shopping cart with other retail stores.

I’m not an Ad Match Guarantee person. Probably should be, and once sort of was earlier in our marriage when I had my self-titled “Retail Project” spreadsheet to track prices for frequently purchased items at our primary retail stores. Great idea when I had more time.

My exclusive experience with the Ad Match Guarantee is getting caught behind someone at Walmart with a cartful of stuff segregated into non-coupon, coupon, and Ad Match items. Waiting for an Ad Match customer to get done with their “convenient” shopping experience typically sucks for those behind them in line. It can seem like forever as they take over managing the Walmart brand experience by informing the checker item-by-item on prices and how to check them out.

Brand Experience and Faulty Customer Segment Innovation

This is a prime example of a brand ceding control of its brand experience to one customer group to the detriment of the rest of its customers who aren’t Ad Match shoppers.

The other night though, a benign Ad Match situation turned into an even more bizarre retail experience. We were behind a woman buying lots of groceries, although with only one Ad Match item – a pack of batteries. She saved them for last, telling the checker they were $4.89 at another retail store. Without any apparent hesitation, the checker took her word and rang the batteries up at that price, just at the Ad Match guarantee promises.

Then, it was our turn. We went to Walmart to buy two cases of Diet Coke. There were no cases (at $5.98) to be found, and two 12-packs were nearly $8.00. We did find 6-packs for $1.50 each on an end cap. We loaded up the cart with eight 6-packs; great price, but inconvenient to handle. We placed just one 6-pack on the belt. When it reached the checker, I told her we had 8 of them. She stopped everything to bend way over and count how many 6-packs we had in the cart and verify I was telling the truth.

Wait! You mean the shopper in front of us could tell the checker a price for an item at another retail store that could have been completely bogus, and the checker accepted it without hesitation, but she had to do the old 1,2,3 count for our Diet Coke to make sure we weren’t lying?

Yup.

So, I told her I should have just grabbed the 12-packs and had her Ad Match to the $1.50 Diet Coke on the end caps – which would have been a lot more convenient. She mumbled that she couldn’t Ad Match to the Diet Coke because it is stocked by Coca-Cola and not Walmart. She planned, however, to let somebody know about the $2 price gap.

Wait! You mean Walmart can Ad Match another retail store’s prices, but can’t address a stupid pricing situation in its own retail store for the sake of MY shopper convenience?

Really?

3 Questions to Test Faulty Customer Segment Innovation

Here’s the lesson for all our brands: when your brand innovates a great program to enhance the brand experience for a certain segment of high volume customers (or any other customer segment), ask these questions:

1. In what ways might the program compromise the brand experience for other customer segments?
2. Does the program, by changing our typical processes, cause employee behaviors which don’t make sense or won’t be well received by other customer segments?
3. Even if we can’t answers questions 1 and 2 right now, what do we have in place to monitor weird exceptions and negative brand experience situations the program causes?

To make our experience even more odd, when we got home, we realized the checker had not given the shopper in front of us all her groceries. The checker gave us a bag of lunch meat and Tapioca pudding belonging to the previous customer.

So the previous customer, by mucking up the end of her checkout experience with just one Ad Match Guarantee item, distracted the checker enough to wind up losing a $15 bag of groceries while saving maybe 60 cents on a pack of batteries.

That my friends, is every day crappy value. - Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Well kids, it’s a new week, and you know what that means: there’s a new book on innovation and creative thinking.

The Wall Street Journal featured an excerpt from “Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results,” (affiliate link) by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg, in its Review section complete with claims of a “radically different approach” to innovation. In the article Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg offer up five techniques integral to their “method” which “works by taking a product, concept, situation, service or process and breaking it into components or attributes.”

If you’re a regular Brainzooming reader, this will sounds familiar as the “Trait Transformation” or “SCAMPER” creative thinking exercise repackaged and offered up as something better and different than brainstorming.

Inside the Box and Creative Thinking

Wading into the five techniques, they are all either individual or combo versions of pretty classic creative thinking exercise approaches to modify something you have right now to come up with something new:

• “Subtraction” involves REMOVING something from a product
• “Task Unification” is another version of COMBINING features
• “Multiplication” relates to the “M” in Scamper through MAXIMIZING a feature
• “Division” is a combination of DO LESS and PUT TO ANOTHER USE.
• “Attribute Dependency” is a more specific take on ADAPT.

So while the principles are completely sound, and the examples offered for each are intriguing (if somewhat dated in certain cases), the excerpt from “Inside the Box” suffers from the faux “this is a completely new way to innovate” theme that seems to bog down lots of innovation and creativity coverage in the Wall Street Journal.

Can you say, “Remember Jonah Lehrer?”

I WAS intrigued by how the combinations and slight variations on the trait transformers they discussed could lead to new potential ideas and solutions because they were more nuanced. We’ve modified previous transformers over time to create different directions for ideas (i.e., we use one story development version of Trait Transformation that ties to principles in “Made to Stick”).

Creative Thinking Exercise – SCAMPER Adapted

Thinking about all the “Inside the Box” article prompted coming up with other transformer questions we’ll be using in the future. Simply list a variety of attributes for a current situation and ask: How can this attribute be turned into . . .

• A more positive feature?
• A negative feature that leads to another way to solve it?
• An attractive benefit?
• Something caused by something else?
• Something that causes something else to happen?
• An enhanced variation of what the attribute is/does currently?
• Individual pieces ripe for rearranging?

These questions are kludgey since they’re brand new ideas for questions and haven’t been refined through using and testing them yet. It does seem like there are real possibilities in here, though. Trying them out, I came up with a cool new possibility for configuring a shower and how its water is controlled.

Brilliant Blunders

The Kansas City Star ran a book review this weekend from Marcia Bartusiak of “The Washington Post” on “Brilliant Blunders” by Mario Livio (affiliate link). The book profiles scientific giants and the mistakes preceding some of their great discoveries.

The book review paints “Brilliant Blunders” in a great light, and included several good quotes, certainly suitable for future presentations:

• “The road to triumph (is) paved with blunder.” – Mario Livio
• “Mistakes do no harm in science because there are lots of smart people out there who will immediately spot a mistake and correct it.” – Linus Pauling
• “To achieve something really worthwhile in research, it is necessary to go against the opinions of one’s fellows.” – Fred Hoyle
• “The blunders of genius are often indeed the portals of discovery.” – Mario Livio

There you go – a new creative thinking exercise and quotes about brilliant blunders. You’re set for a great week of creative exploration! – Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact TheBrainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us atinfo@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

                                                (Affiliate Links)

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Assumptions are vital. Despite the whole “when you assume you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me,’” maxim, assumptions can be valuable and speed analysis, decision making, and implementation.

But when evaluating what assumptions are being made, however, it’s vital to look at your own assumptions as skeptically as you view those of others.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

Brand Identity and Logo Design

During a presentation on new brand identity and logo design work recently, the brand manager was, obviously, very involved in creating the new brand identity. Before unveiling the new brand identity recommendation, however, he reviewed the organization’s current, but long-ago designed, logo. While the old logo is familiar through repetition, the presenter highlighted two subtle logo elements that were a surprise to me. Although obvious after the fact, I’d never noticed one of the logo elements previously, and the other I had MAYBE noticed “subconsciously.”

When pointing out these two design elements, the brand manager mocked them because they are, especially to those unfamiliar with the organization, obscure. Although the two elements depicted in the logo are publically associated with his organization, the graphic representation is too subtle for the uninitiated (i.e., POTENTIAL customers). Because of that, he rightly identified the old logo as not working hard enough for most of the intended audience.

Then, after a little fanfare, he unveiled his organization’s new brand identity work.

The new logo makes the organization instantly recognizable. But (in my strategic view), the new logo is unnecessarily cluttered and has a retro feel clearly off strategy for an organization trying to promote its forward-looking perspective.

The brand manager addressed one graphic element that seemed particularly out of date: it’s an exact match of a visual element on display throughout the organization’s headquarters location.

Yes, it’s all over THE INSIDE of its headquarters.

Since the brand manager works INSIDE headquarters, this antiquated visual element made perfect sense to him. To most audience members (who NEVER see the headquarters), however, it screams “antique,” which is equivalent to “off brand.”

Interestingly though, THAT assumption made all the sense in the world to the brand manager even though it’s an even more gross oversight than the assumptions he’d been skewering just a few moments before about the old logo.

What Assumptions Are You Making about Your Brand Identity and Logo Design?

Yup, we love our own assumptions, and often think others’ assumptions are just plain stupid.

My advice: find someone who doesn’t know what you know. Ask this person what assumptions you’re making and if any of them are just plain stupid. Once you’ve had someone do that, see how strong your idea still is. You’ll be better off for doing this . . . trust me. - Mike Brown

Learn all about Mike Brown’s creative thinking and innovation presentations!

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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I wrote an article for an upcoming issues of The Social Media Monthly magazine about how high visibility tragedies are affecting brands’ social media strategies. While much is written about what a brand should do DURING a tragedy, The Social Media Monthly article focuses on what brands can do before the next tragedy, and includes interviews with social media luminaries Jim Joseph and Lisa Grimm.

Social Media Moments of Silence

One norm developing relative to tragedies and social media management for brands is the “social media moment of silence.” This phrase reflects an expectation that for certain tragedies, some or all brands are expected to curb or completely halt social media sharing out of respect for victims of tragedy.

Something I didn’t cover in the article was our exploration on what defines a tragedy warranting a social media moment of silence.

Both Jim Joseph and Lisa Grimm acknowledged there are no hard and fast rules for which tragedies necessitate a social media shutdown. Yet reviewing 2012 and 2013, the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, CT and the Boston Marathon bombing represented the tragedies where expectations were greatest for shutting down social media sharing for brands…and others.

5 Areas to Monitor for Social Media Moments of Silence

In the absence of fully-defined norms, here are five areas to consider before and during the next tragedy to help shape your brand’s social media sharing:

The Tragedy’s Geography – Social media moments of silence seem confined to First World tragedies, and more specifically, those taking place between Washington, DC and Boston. Much of the news media is concentrated in this corridor, and events here receive more attention than shootings, weather, explosions, and disasters elsewhere.

The Volume of Immediate News Coverage – Use CNN as your gauge for how much attention a tragedy is broadly getting. The more continuous coverage a tragedy receives, along with a high degree of immediate live coverage, raises expectations for a social media moment of silence. Greater uncertainty in determining the extent of a tragedy can also argue for keeping silent – in case the tragedy suddenly gets much worse.

The Familiarity of the Story Surrounding the Tragedy – The easier it is for the members of the general public to place themselves within the story, the more likely a moment of silence is expected. It was clearly easier for the public to see themselves with kids at a school or at a major public event in a major city than to be located in a small rural town with a major explosion.

The Types of Victims Involved in the Tragedy – The larger the number of victims, the younger the victims, and victims felled by human-on-human violence all drive higher expectations to shut up your social media voice.

The Tragedy’s Current Status – A lack of closure seems a major factor affecting how long a social media moment of silence is expected to last. The longer the period of uncertainty (whether that’s if the tragedy is over or the time to understand the reasons), the greater the likelihood the moment of silence needs to extend for a longer period of time.

What do you think about social media moments of silence?

As we said at the start, the norms aren’t all formed on how to approach a social media moment of silence. What do you think of this list? Are there other criteria you would add?

We’ll be monitoring these five criteria (and others that emerge) going forward toward solidifying stronger strategic guidelines for modifying brands’ social media behaviors during various types of tragedies. - Mike Brown

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If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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The headlines are filled with stories about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI tapping information directly from social media and Internet company servers through the PRISM program. There are clearly many people talking about the NSA social media story with a lot to say about it.

All I’ll offer is an admonition I try to apply personally:  Live your life – including your life on social media – as if it’s all open for viewing by someone you may never expect is paying attention to what you are saying and doing. As further clarification, there’s a Bible verse about everything hidden coming to light. That’s pretty much the strategy I struggle with and strive to carry out!

Online Vigilante Behavior

While the NSA story is sobering, egregious uses of online information happen on a much smaller and potentially more immediately damaging level, too. Just think about the examples you see of self-appointed online vigilantes who shine an accusatory light on whatever and whoever offends them – with no oversight at all.

The most recent example I saw appeared on Facebook this weekend. It was re-shared, of course, by an online vigilante who prompted an earlier Brainzooming post on the topic. This particular share, however, wasn’t about online behavior.

The Stranger on the Train

This online vigilante story started with someone snapping a photo of a stranger on a train traveling from Philadelphia. With no corroboration, no proof, and no particular explanation of her own motives (other than personal frustration and indignation), the woman taking photo shared it on Facebook along with a status update alleging the guy and his buddies talked for two hours about having extramarital affairs their wives had never discovered.

The person sharing the picture originally asked others to re-share the guy on the train’s photo hoping it would reach the Facebook wall of his wife or someone who knows him so his wife finds out about it.

Using Social Media to Punish Strangers

Wow!

This is a scary story: one stranger, with no accountability to anyone or expectations of disclosure, reported a story about another stranger, with a serious accusation that no one can effectively corroborate.

And not only that, the person’s request that the photo be shared resulted in more than 276,000 shares in the first week since it was placed on Facebook.

This is an example that can potentially upend multiple peoples’ lives – all done without a second thought or ANY oversight.

Maybe the guy is a complete louse. Maybe he’s completely innocent. But when a random train rider who fancies him or herself an online vigilante can decide another person’s guilt and attempt to impose a self-determined punishment because it feels right to that individual? That’s a scary society!  - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Luke Sullivan, a copywriter, creative director (Fallon McElligott and The Martin Agency), and author of “Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads” (affiliate link), spoke about the critical importance of cultural tension to creative ideas at AAFKC.

Ironically, for a presentation all about creative ideas coming from drama, tension, and conflict, Luke Sullivan’s presentation (which he guaranteed wouldn’t suck) was titled, “Leveraging Cultural Tension to Improve Creativity.

Leveraging?

How much more boring, uncreative, and corporate jargony can you get? I tweeted beforehand that “Leveraging” should have been replaced with “Kicking the MF Ass of.” With Luke Sullivan’s in-your-face presentation style, that definitely would have been a better title.

Consider this post one big paraquote, i.e. it’s pulled from live tweets and pictures during the Luke Sullivan talk with some additional words to string them all together. That’s a paraquote post!

Creative Ideas, Drama, and Conflict

We are all interested in conflict. It’s human nature to be intrigued by conflicts, problems, and drama. When everything is okay, we’re not interested. If you want people to be interested in your advertising, you have to find the tension.

All drama is conflict. Everybody needs an enemy. Think about how much Star Wars would have sucked with just Luke.

Bad ass guys are interesting, and they make for a rocking story (Think Mayhem – although Mayhem may be more creatively than financially successful for Allstate). Everybody wants to be the bad guy. Don’t believe it? Kids go out for Halloween dressed as Michael Myers. Nobody dresses up like Jamie Lee Curtis for Halloween!

Figure out who is the enemy for your brand? Who the hell does your brand want to slap the crap out of?

Problems, Tension, and Creativity

Creativity happens in response to a problem. When it comes to advertising, finding the tension to spark creative can come from a variety of places: your brand vs. the other brand, cultural issues (i.e., we celebrate thin people as ideal but we also love crappy, fattening food), contrasting ideologies and themes, unseemly things in a product category.

If you bake tension into your creative strategy, you set the stage for ongoing story building. It’s imperative you address the tension, truth, and emotion of the situation authentically, though.

Negatives and Anticipation Get Attention

Problems are interesting. Solutions are boring. “Got milk?” works, but a campaign about “Have milk!” wouldn’t go anywhere. What’s interesting is what’s ABOUT to happen in your advertising. Negatives work. That’s why advertising people can be seen as so negative . . . because negative works!

Finding Tension for Creative Ideas

Where do you look for tension when you’re trying to create attention for a product or category that doesn’t have tension? You MAKE UP the tension!

Steps 1 and 2 in finding tension:

Also, look toward conflict. Want to find great sources of conflict ideas? Look back at “The Far Side” cartoons (affiliate link), since all of the Far Side revolved around conflict.

Translating Uncomfortable Tension into great Advertising

Great strategic creative briefs build in conflict. A bad strategic creative brief doesn’t tell you anything new. And if there’s nothing new, it’s simply a boring old rerun. If the creative winds up being bad, everyone in the room who has touched it is to blame. A big reason for bad creative is because a decision was made to throw everything into the advertising. Saying, “We got it all in there,” should always be uttered with a deep sense of shame.

Parting Shots from Luke Sullivan

True communication is what your listener takes away. And, the simpler something is, the less it ages. – Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact TheBrainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us atinfo@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

(Affiliate Links)

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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