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The place do good concepts come from?
After serving as CEO of the promoting company BBDO Worldwide for 20 years, working carefully with a few of the largest manufacturers on this planet, I’ve come to a solution: Good concepts come from a willingness to have unhealthy concepts — many, many unhealthy concepts.
If you need the artistic course of to work, it’s essential to settle for that it’s messy. As a substitute of inching your approach, step-by-step, from information to resolution in a logical development, it is best to generate a chaotic array of potentialities and take a look at them out on the issue till one thing clicks. Bounce to conclusions with out worrying about the way you cross the intervening hole.
I do know that sounds summary. So here is a selected instance: Snickers.
The origins of an unbelievable marketing campaign
My company got here up with the theme “You are not you while you’re hungry” for a Snickers marketing campaign, which went on to change into one of the profitable campaigns in promoting historical past. It launched with a Tremendous Bowl advert in 2010, that includes the legendary Betty White being “tackled” in a soccer recreation, and has been expanded and localized to 83 international locations world wide.
To at the present time, shoppers ask how we bought the thought. They need to know what market analysis led us to the perception, then the foundational thought, and eventually the Betty White script and marketing campaign that drove hundreds of thousands to eat extra sweet bars. Individuals all the time assume it was an act of brand-purpose oriented, data-driven, logical deduction: Once you’re hungry, in fact you act irrationally.
However we didn’t arrive at that perception totally fashioned. This is the actual story.
When Snickers was first manufactured in Chicago in 1930, it was meant to be a filling snack bar while you had been hungry. Little about it has modified since. However a couple of years into the flip of the twenty-first century, that enduring fact had began to change into humdrum, and Snickers had fallen to No. 7 within the chocolate class.
The problem grew to become: How do you make one thing new and recent out of the identical outdated factor? A line like “Hungry? Eat a Snickers” simply is not going to chop it.
So here is what we did. David Lubars, who was BBDO’s Chief Inventive Officer on the time, gave the project to 5 groups of individuals, who bought busy writing all types of (unhealthy) Tremendous Bowl scripts. Then David reviewed all of them—and buried deep inside certainly one of their scripts, barely calling consideration to itself in any respect, was the road “You are not you while you’re hungry.”
David acknowledged how highly effective that concept could possibly be. It was, he stated, “so versatile and stretchy that it may go wherever on this planet it wanted to go.” And that is what occurred. However to search out an thought this highly effective, he first wanted to generate that massive quantity of unhealthy concepts—making it potential for David to determine a kernel of greatness, see its implications, share his perception together with his colleagues, and get the assist it wanted.
Easy methods to reproduce this course of
This may occasionally sound easy, however it’s not, and it not often occurs organically. As a substitute, it requires one thing that I name The Inventive Shift —a deliberate and strategic option to design the circumstances that can unleash creativity when a company wants it probably the most.
This is how you can be deliberate and strategic about producing unhealthy concepts, so you’ll find the primary one.
First, keep in mind this: Most individuals do not perceive the artistic course of. As a substitute, they usually are likely to say issues like: A good suggestion can come from anybody. Or they may say, there are not any unhealthy concepts. However these ideas squelch creativity, fairly than unleash it—as a result of they put strain on everybody to carry out. In any case, who cares if there are “no unhealthy concepts” if everybody can conceivably give you a terrific one.
That is why, to be really artistic in a gaggle, it’s essential to flip these concepts round. You should inform your group:
1. Unhealthy concepts can come from everybody.
2. I need as many unhealthy concepts as potential in a brief time period.
Why? Let’s begin with human nature. Individuals are afraid of constructing a mistake, so once they’re challenged to give you a number of concepts, they usually shut down. They really feel like they’re on a excessive wire, with no room to deviate. They begin to marvel: What if I am fallacious? What if I look silly in entrance of my boss and colleagues? Will I be blamed if the thought does not work?
However while you particularly invite individuals to give you unhealthy concepts, and to do it in a brief time period, individuals begin considering in a extra open-minded and imaginative methods—as a result of they’re not constrained by the have to be proper, or good, or sensible.
It is the quickest path to success
Perhaps this course of sounds inefficient. Why generate and take into account a number of unhealthy concepts, when you possibly can as an alternative focus your efforts on the appropriate one?
This is why: More often than not, we have now discovered, 9 out of ten concepts are merely not good.
So as an alternative of making an attempt to generate good concepts (which is inefficient and unrealistic), your preliminary objective is to easily generate numerous concepts. Thought quantity is an efficient factor, as a result of the most effective concepts usually start as unrealized elements of in any other case unhealthy concepts.
Keep in mind the Snickers instance: The successful thought was buried in an in any other case humdrum script. David was the one who stumbled upon it, after which caught it.
As a frontrunner, it is necessary to fully change the way in which your individuals have a look at the idea-generation course of and create an area the place they’re inspired to have a number of unhealthy concepts. For those who should reward individuals for something at this stage, reward them for having probably the most unhealthy concepts.
From there, you may unleash creativity. And you will find the concept issues.
Tailored from The Inventive Shift: Easy methods to Energy Up Your Group by Making House for New Concepts Copyright © 2025 by Andrew Robertson. Accessible from Fundamental Enterprise, an imprint of Hachette E-book Group, Inc.
The place do good concepts come from?
After serving as CEO of the promoting company BBDO Worldwide for 20 years, working carefully with a few of the largest manufacturers on this planet, I’ve come to a solution: Good concepts come from a willingness to have unhealthy concepts — many, many unhealthy concepts.
If you need the artistic course of to work, it’s essential to settle for that it’s messy. As a substitute of inching your approach, step-by-step, from information to resolution in a logical development, it is best to generate a chaotic array of potentialities and take a look at them out on the issue till one thing clicks. Bounce to conclusions with out worrying about the way you cross the intervening hole.
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