Social Control

03 February 10

So, let's say that your watch brand wants to start selling to athletes. You bring in your best creative people. You sit them down in a room. And you tell them: "start brainstorming". After 2 minutes of dead silence, you realize that you need to enable that creativity with a tool or technique that guides their thinking.

When we work with a brand to develop their digital strategy or technology solution, we break out all of the creativity tools we can possibly find and we go to work. At first, it's about generating a lot of ideas. Then, we cull those ideas into something manageable, keeping the best and backburnering the rest. ("backburnering" has just been coined as a verb. By us).

Creative tools and techniques are all about breaking the paradigm that your mind is in. Sometimes they are intended to help you think of something in new ways. Other times, creative tools are designed to help you connect the thing you're thinking about with something entirely different, thus creating a new idea. One tool that is effective to achieve "new connections" is the Random Word technique.

With the random word technique, you take the thing you're thinking about (such as the watch brand, which I mentioned as an example above) and you add just some word, pulled randomly from your nearby Webster's.

I just busted out my dictionary and found the word "salamander". So, now I put my best creative minds to work connecting the watch brand with the word "salamander".

Yeah, it sounds weird but it works. The team might think of new colors and textures; they might think of brand modifications; perhaps there's a way to market the watch using a salamander (as long as it doesn't look like Geico's Gecko, of course!). The first thing that came to mind for me was how some lizard tails will grow back if they're broken off and I was reminded of a time when I tore my favorite watch while working out and had to buy a new one. Is there something there?

As you can see, this creative technique doesn't just create opportunities for marketing – which is how we use it – but it can help much earlier in the development, too: Brand development, product development, and more.

And, in case you think I just sit here and make this stuff up, you can read more about this idea:

Here: http://creatingminds.org/tools/random_words.htm
Here: http://www.infinn.com/randomwordtutorial.html
And here: http://thinkingclub.com.au/?p=62

And if you want a random word and don't have a dictionary handy, this website will give you a random word:
http://www.infinn.com/randomword.html

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