The Toy Was Behind Something

We rearranged the girls’ playroom and they walked back into it like tourists. Same toys. Same walls. Nothing new came through the front door (I would like it on the record that I bought nothing). We just moved things around, and the whole mood of the room tipped, and toys that had been sitting there like furniture were suddenly the most important objects in the house.

Kids don’t play with the best toy. They play with the one in front of them.

The toy at the back of the shelf was never boring. It was behind something.

That is the entire job of positioning, and the job is sitting right there in the word. Where a thing sits decides whether anyone picks it up. When a campaign goes stale, the reflex is to buy more inventory: a new channel, a new offer with a new font. Usually the inventory is fine. The arrangement fell asleep.

At a marketing offsite, we ran a worst idea ever challenge. A whole group pitching the most terrible things they could think of, on purpose, out loud. It is very easy to look at that and see a room full of salaried adults manufacturing garbage, since every idea in it was designed to die there.

Except a truly terrible idea is hard to write without knowing exactly what the customer can’t stand. A great bad idea is a precise map of somebody’s fear, drawn upside down. In a normal brainstorm everybody is guarding their name, so the ugly true thing about the customer stays politely in their pocket. Ask for the worst and people hand it over gladly…

Then we flipped them. Same knowledge, turned over. One of them is on its way to becoming a real campaign.

The worst ideas came out of the same heads as the polite ones. Nothing new came into that room either. Everything the campaign needed was already at the table.

It was just facing the wall.

Stay Positive & Disruption Can Be A Positive Occurrence