Being remarkable and memorable involves deliberate steps.
Change the scheme.
Alter the mood.
Interrupt the routine.
Be unexpected.
Need an illustration and example? Watch how this (now famous) airline steward does just that during the usually mundane cabin announcement before the tragic experience that’s air travel in the now times.
There’s a scene in the movie MIB that offers a valuable piece of insight.
When Officer Edwards (Will Smith’s character) of the NYPD turns up for his MIB recruitment interview, the competition is hot. The best of the best (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) are all in the room vying for a single position in the MIB.
The recruits face a series of tests (or two, so a short series).
Edwards gets the job.
Why not one of the highly-educated, combat-experienced and government-trained members of the military elite?
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I’m not going to pretend that I know the exact thought process behind this, but from what I see here it looks like the beer parents of one brand are eating their own young.
In this case, the parent is XXXX Gold, a grand old staple of the Aussie beer fraternity. The young is a new brand on the market in XXXX Summer Bright, Lion Nathan’s Cerveza-styled entry to the market.
Lion Nathan launched XXXX Summer Bright nationally earlier this month with a campaign that included outdoor (having been tested in several Australian geographical markets over the past year).
Here’s the Summer Bright campaign…..
And here’s one of at least 5 billboards I saw yesterday on a cross-town trip.
The creative executions are vaguely similar but it’s the media choice (outdoor) which is the factor proving my headline most strongly.
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The concept of thinking outside the box has been around a long time and it’s valid. Just because you’re thinking outside one box though, it doesn’t mean that you haven’t made another one.
Wouldn’t it be better to keep shifting the box, or even do away with the box altogether?
That’s the real bedrock of creative thinking and a spirit we should all be getting into.
One summer when I was a young, wide-eyed lad, I recall a promotion that McDonalds ran where young, wide (and not-so-wide) eyed lads could win a free poster of the World Series Cricket teams. You didn’t have to buy anything to get the prize (even though you would anyway, so marketing objective one achieved for Maccas). All you had to do was say the Big Mac “Two all beef patties…” jingle.
The catch was that you had to do it in 4 seconds or less.
Wanting that poster and knowing what I had to do to get it, I practiced that line over and over (marketing objective two achieved) until I could nail it in under 4 seconds, visited Maccas and claimed my poster.
That was my first ever (memorable) exposure to a sales promotion. Looking back, it was also a point where I could identify such a thing as an unhealthy obsession with perfection.
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Have you ever had one of those days where you learned absolutely nothing, gained no knowledge at all? It feels empty and incomplete.
A day without gaining any knowledge at all is a day wasted, no matter what else happens, because knowledge is currency and one day you might need to draw on it.
Whether it’s trivial or mountain-shifting, edifying or entertaining, there’s always something new to be discovered. Learning a single piece of something can also start you on a trail of discovery that can uncover a whole series of thoughts, ideas and insights, which in-itself is always exciting.
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