Darwin’s vision of man and ape as separated only by a few millennia meant that essentially we were on the same footing as animals. This implicity challenged relationships such as father son and holy spirit. It’s hard to be a creative thinker without upsetting people because when you spot new symmetries you disturb existing ones.
Henry Ford famously used the paradigm of meat packing to find a better way of building a car. Essentially it inverted the notion that mechanics walked around a single car, gradually constructing it over a period of months. Under Ford’s system, it was the converse; cars proceeded like cow carcasses from one specialised process to the next. Where cows were disassembled, cars were being assembled. By seeing a car as a relatively low value object he could transform its production, and produce the world’s first high volume automobile.
The pregnant man visual (top right) was part of an Health Education Council to reduce unwanted pregnancies. The headline ran “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?” Copywriter Jeremy Sinclair, (Saatchi’s). By exploiting the symmetry of an imaginary situation, there’s an unarguable case for being more careful with contraception.
Below, bottom left, mushroom as jet engine. This visual idea was used both by British Airways to sell its food services, and also by HSBC to discuss organic fuel sources in the future. The BA idea ran “Before we fuel the aircraft, we fuel the passenger”. The HSBC campaign creatively recycled it, with the line “In future, we will all fly organic.” Anyway, the point is that strong ideas discover and exploit meaningful symmetry. See conceptual symmetries and Darwin
See also Ideas
If anyone doubts the value of good content, you only have to start looking at the modern customer journey and how it operates to see the importance.
People no longer expect to meet, greet and chat to you to make up their minds.
They effectively start their buying decision process in cyberspace, clicking around and forming an opinion about your brand. 70% of the decision is made before they meet your first actual agent.
This has huge implications for content.
The obvious one being that if you do it well, you can bring someone into an appreciation of your brand and offering in a more automated way and with fewer sales agents.
But there’s a flip side, too: you can’t really afford to do it badly. If you do, what starts as a customer journey set for a sale with you, could spin of into a sale with someone else.
And where average or adequate content that ticked a few boxes would suffice a few years ago, now that content has to be good enough that people seek it out.
Or that Google seeks it out.
Effectively what Google and the modern consumer is asking every company to become is its own broadcasting channel and or newspaper.
And that doesn’t always come easily to many corporations.
It requires mining into the organization to find the genuinely interesting things to say, and sharing knowledge that helps the consumer make up their own minds.
It requires generating fresh material with fresh insights and points of view.
And it requires treating your customers as equals.
And it involves sharing knowledge and information with the outside world, information that sometimes seems hard enough to share internally. But then that is what the sharing economy is really about.
