A marketing idea is the communication a target consumer experiences that causes him or her to do something or believe something about a product or service. Next time your advertising people you deal with bring you the latest “great idea” weigh against these 3 specific criteria:
- COOL
- CUSTOM
- EFFECTIVE
The media is never the idea. At Cox Media Group Jacksonville, we certainly lean on radio as a highly effective means of delivering a message, but we never present a spot schedule as The Marketing Idea. Let’s go deeper into the criteria.
Cool:
Marketing ideas have to be cool and fresh to the Target Consumer. “Cool” implies relevance. Ideas, and most especially marketing ideas have to be relevant to the Target Consumer. But relevance doesn’t totally capture the essence of cool. “Cool” also means that the ideas has immediate, novel, and cutting-edge appeal. A cool idea has the best chance of breaking through the harsh noise of bad messaging in our culture and capturing the attention of the consumer. Only a Cool idea has the power to cause that consumer to want to engage with any given business.
Custom:
Marketing ideas have to be customized to the marketer’s business brand. Custom ideas let the target consumer know which of the millions of brands out there is responsible for this cool idea. Only a custom idea can illustrate-even prove- to the target consumer that his particular product or service is different from all its competitors in a way that is valuable to the target consumer.
Effective:
Marketing ideas have to be effective. Only an effective idea has a chance to cause a Target Consumer to do or believe something about any given product or service. An effective idea lays out the path for the target to follow as he engages with a brand. Effective ideas give that target consumer reasons to stay engaged with the program and reasons to believe the benefits offered.
Ideas come from a process and the process needs to be facilitated
In every company there are people who are more creative than everybody else, and there is a natural temptation to defer all idea generation to the handful of people to whom ideas come naturally. If you keep creativity solely in the hands of those people labeled as “the creatives”, you make your organization smaller. I use a process that gets more people involved in the generating ideas and getting higher quality ideas in the process.
The process requires a leader and trained facilitator to manage the process that makes it easy for a team of people to work together to create marketing ideas. It requires leadership and a trained facilitator to get a group to focus on a narrow marketing objective. It requires leadership and a trained facilitator to give this group the tools and confidence to express their ideas in front of others.
I have the leadership and am a certified Creative Problem Solving facilitator from two different training organizations to find Cool, Custom and Effective ideas for your business.
