How can you come up with innovative ideas that customers will love, even when what they say they want isn’t what they want at all?

Here are three tips: [Read more...]

Humans are wired for stories – we tell them, love to hear and read them, and look for them in the chaos of the world to feel a sense of order. We communicate these stories by drawing pictures with language and most directly, with images themselves – from cave paintings to family photos, scribbles, scrapbooks, videos, to Pinterest boards – communicating through pictograms is a cultural habit that is near universal.

Images are symbolic of our lives and our culture. Anytime we as marketers can use them we convey so much more than we could have had we depended solely on words. Pictures also help businesses engage customers because an image is an oasis, a moment of relief from the bombardment of all the “noise” in the marketplace. Using icons in your product packaging and sales materials is a secret weapon. [Read more...]

No new invention is completely original and everything stands on the shoulders of what has come before. Why try to come up with an original idea when someone else has already done the hard work for you? Is there a product or process from another industry that you can make disruptive in your market?

Francois Hennebique needed a stronger building material than concrete. While attending the Paris Exhibition of 1867, he found an exhibit for concrete flowerpots that contained a metal mesh. The need for reinforced concrete in the building industry, which made skyscrapers possible, had already been invented in the gardening context by Joseph Monier. [Read more...]

If companies want to innovate the way successful bold newcomers have, they have to unplug
from the constraints of “That’s the way we’ve always done it” and recharge, starting with the
mantra, “Let’s just not do that anymore.” They need to be willing to take market risks that more
traditional companies are often unwilling or unable to take.

It’s surprising that we repeat things in business even when we don’t get the results we want,
but we’re creatures of habit and old habits are hard to break. Changing a routine takes time and
thought out of our busy work lives and there is a risk in trying something new. Even something
that is simple and accessible and that has an obvious benefit doesn’t always go over right away.
It took almost 200 years for the British Navy to give all its sailors citrus to prevent scurvy even
though it had been demonstrated several times during those years that it was an effective cure. [Read more...]