Revamp Your Thinking: The Art of Mind Twisting for Innovation

This theory will help you create new products

"Necessity… the mother of inventions"

Plato

A few months ago, I was moving to a new apartment. I had to tackle some tedious tasks of packing, unpacking, minor repairs, etc. And when I began to search online for appropriate tools and packaging materials, I discovered a new world.

People there used simple, cheap, and yet handy gadgets.

They moved furniture without scratching expensive flooring.

They hammered the nails without smashing their fingers.

And the holes they drilled in the walls were perfectly round and clean.

The first thought that struck me was, “Why on Earth it was not me who invented all these wonderful things?”

Every day, startup founders try to come up with new products, be it an AI-backed technology or a vegetable slicer.

And every day, they ask themselves: “How can we unleash our imagination and create something new?”

And a tool called ‘lateral marketing’ can help them — and you.

Problem

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail"

Abraham Maslow

Why can’t we just wake up in the morning with a great product idea in mind? Because our brains are pattern-recognition machines.

Ancient hunters skilled at spotting prey and predator and telling poisonous plants from healthy ones had a better chance of survival than those blind to the patterns.

You can recognize a cat, a house, or a human being even in an unskilled child’s drawing. It only takes milliseconds and doesn’t consume much precious cognitive energy.

And our lazy brains hate to waste energy.

Most of the time, our mind runs on autopilot, following the path that patterns tell it to follow — like a train on the track.

But what worked perfectly for the ancient hunters prevents today’s inventors and creators from coming up with fresh ideas.

What do you see when you look at your product? Most likely, you see… your product. You may notice its flaws, but you can’t discern the opportunities for improvement or radical change.

Your product has become a pattern for you. That’s why newcomers in the industry often propose more exciting ideas than experienced professionals — but only in the beginning.

But there is a way to break this pattern and start thinking differently.

A 27 by 15 kilometres island

Malta is a tiny island in the Mediterranean Sea. Its area is only 316 square kilometers (122 square miles). Chicago, for instance, is almost twice as big.

On 19 May 1933, a boy named Edward de Bono was born in Malta. During the Second World War, the island was isolated from the rest of the world. Edward’s parents couldn’t buy him new toys because nobody imported goods to the country. And he began to look at the old ones from a new perspective.

Twenty-four years later, in 1967, he taught the whole world to look at familiar objects from a fresh angle. He published his first book, The Use of Lateral Thinking.

De Bono believed that creative thinking wasn’t a gift or an art but a skill. He worked out an array of techniques to turn one’s thinking upside down.

The scientific society didn’t accept his findings. Nevertheless, many marketers, inventors, and workshop facilitators don’t care. They benefit from using the tool, and so can you.

In 2003, Philip Kotler published a book , Lateral Marketing: New Techniques For Finding Breakthrough Ideas, based on De Bono’s concept.

Here is a summary of De Bono and Kotler’s ideas. It is a step-by-step guide that you can use to create new products.

I use this simplified and slightly adapted version of Kotler’s concept to conduct creative workshops for my clients. You may brainstorm with your team using the simple frameworks below.

Solution

Philip Kotler offered to consider the task of creating a new product, or modifying an existing one, at three levels:

• Market level
• Product level
• Marketing mix level

Market level

A market is a place where a product meets customers. There are six aspects of this customer-product interaction (Kotler called them ‘dimensions’) we need to take into consideration:

1. Need. Why do customers buy this product? What task or problem do they want to solve by using it?
2. Target audience. Who are the customers?
3. Time. When do they usually purchase the product?
4. Place. Where do they usually do it?
5. Occasion. What occasion or event can make them think about buying the product?
6. Activity. What activity or emotions accompany the process of purchasing?

Imagine that you try to re-invent a hammer. Your company may already sell hammers, or you may try to re-invent them from scratch.

Try to play with these six aspects as shown in the picture:

Need. What else could customers buy hammers for, except hammering nails? Try to find unusual answers. What about swatting mosquitos at home?

Target audience. Typically, we believe that men are the ones who buy hammers. Could women or children become our regular customers?

Time. Are there customers who want to buy hammers at night or on a Sunday evening?

Place. Consumers typically buy hammers in stores or online. Where else could we sell our products? What about railway stations?

Occasion. People ordinary purchase hammers when they need to do some work. Can a hammer become a fancy birthday present?

Activity, emotions. Try to link your product with a new experience. For instance, you may want to give a hammer to everyone who buys a house.

Some ideas may seem unrealistic or even weird. But almost all innovations seemed unworkable or impractical in the beginning.

Product level

Choose one aspect or part of your product, and do the following:

Does anybody need a hammer with scissors instead of a handle?

Could you combine your hammer with a drill?

Can a hammer pull nails out of planks?

Imagine a hammer without a handle or head.

Could anybody possibly need a there-meter hammer?

Could we sell hammers that must be held by the heads and nails to be hammered with the handles?

Marketing Mix Level

At this level, you may consider three aspects of the marketing mix — pricing, distribution, and communication.

Try to change them by asking five of the six questions you asked in the previous step.

No tool can guarantee that you’ll invent a game-changing, successful product. It would sound too good to be true.

But the exercises above will help you unleash your creativity and break the patterns that prevent you from looking at your product from a different angle.

If you need help with developing a new product or improving the existing one, email me, and we’ll discuss the possible cooperation in detail.

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