The #1 never-fail technique for creative ideas

In the area of creative thinking, when you opt for what’s obvious or easy, you’re being “basic”. (It brings me great pleasure and some anxiety to quote iconic fraudster and felon Anna Delvey, but here we are.) That’s why my golden rule for creativity is this:?

Either say something no-one else has ever said before or say something unoriginal in an original way.

Every journo and newshound will tell you it is nigh on impossible to scoop, and scoop, and scoop, interminably, into the future. But you can almost always say something unoriginal in an original way, provided that you reject your first, most obvious associations.

Want an example? Course you do.

I say lite beer. You say, “meh”.

I reference the late, great Derek Watts, you say, “solemn”. (Or “scary”, if you’re a crook.)

Castle Lite’s Lite’n Up?campaign went with the most unexpected celeb beerbassador I’ve seen (til they get Gretha Thunberg). Infectious, funny, self-effacing, but mostly surprising, Derek was the 2022 version of Cadburys Dairy Milk drum-playing gorilla.

Hop right over

To reach this point during your own creative ideation process, you must hop right over your first, obvious, comfortable associations.

1. Think paradoxical?thoughts (ever noticed, for example, how walking is sometimes less tiring than standing?). These kinds of thoughts make it easier to arrive at solutions you wouldn’t ordinarily come up with.
2. Go weird. Not Valentine's Day (February) but Singles’ Month (November). Combine Emoji Day with Nelson Mandela Day. Juxtapose International Day of the Cat with Women’s Day.
3. Be random. Look for tenuous overlaps that you can work into compelling associations, like Checkers Sixty60’s fabulous punning linked to the sky-high petrol price post Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

More on Checkers

To reflect the strain on consumers’ wallets, Checkers Sixty60 housed several products under categories titled “Petrol Blues”. This is profoundly random, since Checkers doesn’t sell petrol or anything vaguely fuel-related.

Alongside shamelessly listing its low-cost house brands, Checkers Sixty60 revealed that, according to the AA, it’s cheaper for many South Africans to get groceries delivered via its app than to drive to the store themselves.

See? Surprising. Relevant. Clever.

Combining ideas, like Checkers did here, is a well-known brainstorming technique. But we should all be using it more in our idea generation, because juxtapositions open up new creative pathways in our brains and put us on the path to shit-hot concepts and angles.

The bottom line?

There’s probably no such thing as a new idea. But there’s definitely no such thing as NO idea. Go beyond the obvious and easy to the downright flipping weird. And write everything down, even the bullshit. You can always delete it afterwards.

P.S. If you want to be able to come up with clever concepts, intelligent angles and compelling hooks that never seem to run dry, you'll love my “Coming Up With Creative Ideas” talk. It covers 3 practical pillars and 6 quick tricks for creative ideation and it's ideal for marketers, communicators, creatives, salespeople, speakers and leaders. DM me.