Creative Techniques to Solve Impossible Challenges | Bryan Mattimore | TEDxFergusonLibrary

this'll be a very how to talk so feel free to take notes if you want to the first story I want to share with you guys was a call from Ben & Jerry's it was actually candalyn wall who used to be a stanford resident she called me from Vermont and said could you come up and help us at Ben & Jerry's invent new novelties so what are novelties novelties are anything but pints right so it could be bonbons or in the case of Ben and Jerry's it would be Ben Ben's right okay bonbons with stuff inside him right so I said great love to do that and by the way she said we're gonna be serving ice cream all day and as the facilitator of that by the end of the day I was literally shaking I'm not kidding I was in sugar shock but it was fun and and so I said great terrific I'll come up and she said oh there's one other thing one other thing we'd like you to help us name a new strawberry and fudge ice cream and I said sure how long you been working on it three months because naming is hard if you ever tried to do naming and marketing it's it's really hard so I said three months okay how much time do we have in this session she said a half hour and I said I can't do it in a half hour she said well you know I'm the client and you're not so that's what we got okay so I said okay and the key to this thing is what this is not brainstorming what are the key takeaways from today is we don't want you to do brainstorming brainstorming has been even though it's a generic term for coming up with ideas it's an actual technique the actual technique has come up with a lot of ideas and withhold judgment so that's the two rules of brainstorming right but research has shown it really doesn't work it really doesn't work and so this is all about ideation so how is ideation different than brainstorming this is a key takeaway you can capture it in one word and that one word is stimuli you use stimuli to trigger the brain right if we go to a client and we've been with that client and they say and they've been thinking about Oreo cookies for a hundred years and we go got any ideas got any more ideas they should throw us out of the room right because we're not using stimuli to trigger their brains so what stimuli did I use in this half-hour to come up with a name for a new strawberry and fudge ice cream I thought well what is the essence of Ben and Jerry's and for me the essence was their anti-authoritarian if you looked at some of their names you'd agree that they are very anti-authoritarian even from Saturday Night Live that name which I won't mention it's amazing right and so I said what could be anti-authoritarian triggers and I thought about I thought about that and it was very simple I said well slang is anti-authoritarian so I got out slang dictionaries cut them up into pieces pass those out had the teams working on this thing Rufus dooby bud V girl all these weird things right but from that from that one team came up with snafu which was strawberries naturally all fledged up and that became that the flavor they watch it under and did extremely well so that's a good example of using stimuli to trigger new ideas okay I want to talk now about this impossible thing right so we get strange calls you know odd calls can you help us do XY and Z and we got one of those calls we were working with a large management consulting firm one of the famous ones and they came up to us or they called us up and they said we've got one of the Big Three automakers and we'd like you to help us help them invent a new sales forecasting system and I'm getting nervous now right because this is it's not new products and part of the take away for you today is that you don't use ideation techniques just for new products or naming or even advertising or promotion you can use it for cost-cutting you can use it for efficiency you can use it for strategy so in this case how do we use some kind of creative technique to help us do a better job of forecasting the sales of our cars so what we did was one of the techniques we use is sort of a semantic analysis technique so we the way we define the challenge was how do we invent a new sales forecasting system pretty simple right and what we do then is look at each of the words in that problem statement or challenge statement or opportunity statement and say what could we do that all right was it and one of those two four six seven words below was the key and when I asked audiences this and the keynotes they kind of they usually guess system first well it wasn't a system you would take a shot at this it wasn't forecasting it was an invent it wasn't sales and it wasn't we and it wasn't new alright I was freaking out by at this point but it was actually a so what are the assumptions inherent in a that it's one sales forecasting system and so the breakthrough idea came when we realized why don't we do a bunch of these we'll have one for manufacturing slash production one for sales one for marketing R&D etc and and then over time because they all have different needs for the sales forecast and then justify it and get a more dynamic sales forecasting system as a result of putting them together so that's what we did and that was a big success so surprised us alright so next I want to go to I want to talk a little about problem framing because this is critical we got a call from an iron company one of the famous a hundred year old ironing companies right and they called us up and said what can you help us invent new irons right and we said great except that's the last thing we want to do ok and by the way if you're in working for a company that's probably not what you said your boss when he asked you to do something is probably you probably don't say that's the last thing we want to do but what was behind this was we all know what an iron is right an iron has got that metal plate and it's got the handle it's got the steam thing coming out and so if we're gonna get really breakthrough ideas we have to think very differently right about irons and this gets back to you know what I don't want to drill I want to hole right or the jobs to be done or whatever you want to call it the consumer benefit and so we framed the challenge differently subtle but important and the difference was how do we invent a new anti-wrinkle device ok and by doing that it freed our minds up actually we weren't even broader than that we went to how do we invent a new garment care device right but the point here was if we had gone into that session saying let's invent new irons I I know from experience I'm convinced we would got haven't gotten nearly we wouldn't have gotten nearly the number of ideas number one nor would they have been breakthrough by going in and how do we how do we invent a new karma care device or a new anti wrinkle device okay so the next story I want to tell was and this is a there-there's a technique called semantic intuition and it's a word combination technique and the way this technique it was invented by Patel in Germany the way this technique works is you sort of mash together different words okay and so we had an assignment both with Oreo cookie and Chips Ahoy and we're working on the Chips Ahoy one and so what you do is you do columns of words that you can combine so things associated with the dessert right and things associated with different forms that a cookie could take and maybe the third column is ingredients and we started mashing those up to trigger our brains right it's all about triggering the brains and so if you get brownie layer and walnut this actually led to the brownie Chips Ahoy cookie and if anybody has tasted that cookie it's absolutely delicious there are D people the food technology people manufacturing people figured out how to put a layer of brownie inside that chocolate chip cookie and it's been and by the way I heard some laughing about that I was I was the store soon after this thing watch and a woman was buying it and she you know I had to go up to a write and say you know why are you buying this brownie Chips Ahoy cookie and she looked at me like I was a total idiot I'm not that that idiot look we've bought and she said it's a brownie inside of a chocolate chip cookie right and and that that was it and sometimes these answers are very very simple right sometimes they're very simple now by the way what's happened now is because that's been in such a big success they put in other stuff in there right so red velvet birthday cake frosting sometimes the idea is the most simple we had an Oreo project going on at the same time it never occurred to us to put Oreo filling inside of the chocolate chip cookie yeah and I almost with good reason right but that product is actually done pretty well I want to move on now to give you a technique this is called a problem redefinition technique and this technique you can use it for anything I'm gonna use it for a very strange call we got to demonstrate it we got a call from a company if watching Wisconsin is Catholic Knights insurance company they've since renamed the name of that company but they what do they do those sell life insurance to Catholics okay and I'm on the phone going who is this right who's calling here life insurance to Catholics and of course that can't you can't sell the Jews and Muslims and Buddhists no we only sell the Catholics and they've actually been sued by all those groups but their charters held up so that was our problem challenge how do we sell more life insurance to Catholics oh boy the way you do this technique is you look for a subject which would be what the we write the verb which would be sell right and the object could either be life insurance to Catholics they weren't going to reinvent their life insurance offerings so we pick Catholics okay so that was our problem challenge then what you do is you go under each one of these and you come up with different options so who else could the we who's typically the we it's the Salesforce right but now you come up with different options so maybe the clergy may be friends of Catholics churchgoers family members etc all these people could help them sell life insurance is that right yes okay how about cell this is thinking more broadly about the word cell license giveaway test run Co market to market et cetera so you come up with options there and the third one is a Catholic a Catholic a Catholic well kind of yes and no you can kind of segment that a little bit right so maybe Catholic doctors the Vatican and millennial Catholics we've got the we got the Pope in there Hispanic Catholics etc okay so now you've got these lists right now what do you do it's sort of mad libs Chinese menu time right so you pick you pick like we usually have them pick three in each column so friends of catholics board members policyholders we just picked those three second combi incentivize license and reward third comm Catholic grandparents Catholic schools and the Vatican all right so we got those then what do you do you redefine your challenge so how do friends of Catholics be incentivized to some where life insurance to Catholic grandparents right okay any how two board members do the licensing of life insurance to Catholic schools and finally how do we get policyholders to reward the selling of life insurance to the Vatican obviously some of these don't work right clearly on the third day what do you do with that but that's not the point right the point is if you get a new idea you got it right and so this company they had come out of the world you know of quality and so they were extremely rigorous about these combinations they would already came up with thousands of combinations of the these things and and so you know one of the ideas for instance was if we go to Catholic schools could we if a certain number of people signed up for for our life insurance a certain number of families then we would donate equipment athletic equipment and computers for instance another one was go to Catholic grandparents if they have a new kid that's that's recently been a grandchild that's recently been born maybe they gift some life insurance to the parents etc etc so about nine months later after we did this work the CMO wrote me and he said and this is about a hundred million dollar company at the time they said we have increased our sales by fifty two percent using this technique so this was an unsolicited feedback from him so what does it take away from that I clearly under charged right but but beyond that the takeaway is that if you do these combinations you can come up with ideas even for something as hard as selling life insurance to Catholics right okay and maybe even a broader the point is you could use this for anything any any time you have a subject verb and object by the way if you have ten in each column how many how many different combinations would you have to redefine this challenge I've asked this the finance people and they've said anywhere from a lot to a hundred and it makes me nervous because it's a thousand right it's ten to the third power 10 times 10 times 10 if you have 20 in each column you get 8,000 right okay so that's the problem redefinition technique the the last technique I want to share with you this this sounded really rough when I got the claw we got a call from the New York ASPCA American Society Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and they said we have a real marketing challenge it's really tough the New York police are giving us all these pitbulls that had been abused by drug dealers and can you help us get New York families to adopt ex drug dealers pit bulls so what we did was we did their different techniques their questioning techniques their metaphor techniques their visual techniques and there's a whole realm of fantasy techniques so we did the fantasy technique we had developed a technique called worst idea where you come up with not good ideas with bad ideas and then you flip it okay we did not do that because we said oh you could you know kill the dog and all this weird stuff so we changed that we adapted that a little bit to say come up with a silly idea a silly idea and that was gangbusters and so some of the some of the silly ideas was maybe you could do a virtual adoption right set up cameras and people might fall in love with a dog and actually adopt him I went and quote met a bunch of these pitbulls and I wanted to bring one home I got to tell you of course my wife would have freaked out we have a have a poo so that's probably breakfast for the further for the pit bull but you know another idea was dress him up in in in costumes and March him in the you know Greenwich Village Halloween parade and a third one which I thought was silly and really fun was let's have let's have let's take him out for a walk walk up to New York and say would you mind holding my dog for a second and then run away so they didn't do that but the net of all this was really cool they realized that they should be personifying these animals and really showing what their personality was and that led to the national campaign which has really helped them place more dogs okay my call to action is here these are not this is not rocket science I want you to learn these techniques right and use them in whatever you're doing it could be at work in your personal life whatever because they work I mean we've helped companies come up with over three billion dollars of stuff and I've written three books but there are a lot of books out there they're not hard to learn and frankly even if you do them poorly right it's better than saying god any ideas got any more ideas last trick I will give you I feature this in my last book because of the Internet of Things now if you have a passion for something you can take a concrete object whatever it is gardening it could be a chair a pen it doesn't matter put the word smart in front of that whatever it is and I guarantee you you will get a new invention and if you doubt that look at the telemarketing or the the telephonic company I won't mention it what do they do they have a commercial out there on what smart asphalt so if we can do smart asphalt you can do something else thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 8,921

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Business, Ideas, Marketing

Id: 7MGBXQMvscY

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018