I don’t like to think outside of the box.
As a marketing guy, I get asked for “out of the box ideas”, and I must push back. Why don’t we figure out what our box is first (category rules, brand standards, guidelines, value proposition, vision, etc.) before we get lost in the outfield?
When you have constraints that require you to filter ideas, you must create some guardrails around an idea. Constraints, limits, and restrictions are creative gold. They help you define a problem.
I like to think along the edge of the box.
Steps to Thinking Along the Edge of the Box
- Define the rules of a category, so you are clear what everyone else does. For example, 90% of all wine gets packaged in 750 ml glass bottles and potato chips come in bags with air to protect the chips.
- Examine where the edge of a category could create an opportunity. Wine in a box or can. Potato chips in a tube or individually wrapped.
- Free yourself from the practical problems like we don’t have the machinery to package wine in cans or chips in tubes. Just imagine how customers in the category might react to your brand that straddles the edge of the category box. Renegade, avant-garde, forward thinker, idiot?
- Generate several ideas that live at the edges. Draw a picture of those ideas and share it with a range of stakeholders like customers, critics, employees, distributors, etc.
- Listen to their feedback. Just be quiet and let others criticize, ridicule and rip apart your ideas.
- After you digest the comments from others, sit quietly and listen to your intuition. Ideas that challenge our current conventions about wine or potato chips aren’t going to be understood or accepted. You will be fighting the norms of a category – but that “blue ocean” is where you can help a category reimagine itself.
Caulipower Pizza lives along the edge of the frozen pizza category with their cauliflower crust. Uber and Lyft live just over the line of the taxi box. Airbnb lives along the line of a hotel room box.
Marketing is about getting noticed by being remarkable.
It is difficult to become noticed when you look and act like everyone else in your category. Wine in a 750 ml isn’t going to get noticed whereas wine in a can or box will stand out and straddle the edge of the box.
If you want customers to notice you, find some real estate along the edge of your category box to hang out.
You can find me hanging out at the edge of the marketing consulting box where I frequently cross the line. Text me at 919 720 0995 or email me at jeffslater@themarketingsage.com if you want to align and connect. Click here to contact me.
Photo courtesy https://www.flickr.com/photos/pcardo/
