Why this idea means business : We explore the idea of eureka moments in marketing. Learn how to encourage your emotional mind to work on your next bright idea. Read this to make marketing eureka moments happen more often.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To get more and better ideas on how to grow your brand by encouraging more eureka moments. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – Innovation
- Skill area – Psychology | Creativity
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. monthly purchases from innovation adoption = +70
- Est. sales increase = +$7k (monthly) | +$84k (annual)
You know the story of Archimedes, right? Given a gnarly mental challenge. Can’t work it out. Has a bath. Eureka! I’ve got it.
We can all relate to that story because we’ve all had that sudden blinding flash of inspiration. Everyone has eureka moments at some point.
A niggly problem. You stop thinking about it. Then, a few hours or days later, the answer suddenly pops into your head. As if by magic. Except it’s not magic. It’s science. Brain science, to be exact.
The brain science of eureka moments
Of course, it being science, the experts don’t all agree on how it works. There are still debates about the exact nature of eureka moments.
The consensus is that they mainly occur in the parts of our brains that process and visualise information and then try to make connections and spot patterns. (the anterior superior temporal gyrus and the Ventral Occipito-Temporal Cortex for any neuroscience nerds). They’re also linked to the hippocampus, the brain’s memory processing area.
However, the key for non-neuroscience nerds is that these brain areas aren’t in its logical system. They’re in its emotional system. So, eureka moments are emotionally rather than logically driven.
Why does this matter? Because when problem-solving, your logical brain usually takes over. However, if it can’t solve it, you need to give your emotional brain some time and space to work on the problem. This is where you find more creative answers.
Give your emotional brain time and space to work
Richard Wiseman’s book 59 Seconds suggests a helpful way to think about how your logical and emotional brains work together.
Drawing on the work of psychologists Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs from the University of Amsterdam, it asks you to imagine two men in a room. One isn’t very creative, but loud and domineering. The other is highly creative, but quiet and shy.
Give them a creative challenge, and the loud but uncreative guy takes over. You’ll get some ideas, but they’ll mostly be obvious and not very original.
However, if you give the loud guy something else to do, and give the quiet guy time and space to work on it, you’ll get a far more creative list of ways to solve your problem.
Of course, in this analogy, the loud guy is your logical brain and the quiet guy is your emotional brain. Meanwhile, your instinctive brain is waiting outside to tell you which ideas are most likely to work.
Putting this into practice
If you’re on your own, trying to creatively think of ideas, there are some easy ways to distract the loud, logical part of your brain.
For example, clear out some emails. Do your expenses. Read a book. It doesn’t matter what it is; just give your logical brain something else to do. This lets your emotional brain work away on the problem in your subconscious.
The same applied to doing more mundane stuff.
Make a coffee. Go for a walk. Do some exercise. If your problem has no urgent time need, sleep on it.
We all know that eureka moments come when we least expect them. The harder we try, the less likely they’ll occur. So go do something else instead. Be patient. Your emotional brain will still be working on it in the background. Sooner or later, an answer will pop into your head, and you’ll be saying, eureka!
Applying eureka moments to marketing - workshops
However, this is harder to do in the workplace. The way most businesses “do” creativity is to run a workshop. But these rarely have eureka moments.
Why? Well, if we stick with the loud, logical and quiet, emotional analogy, then workshops tend to be more logic-led than emotion-led. And as we already shared, eureka moments need more of the latter.
Most workshops stick a bunch of middle managers in a bland hotel conference room and ask them to solve a problem.
Which part of the brain do you think dominates these sessions? The logical brain, of course. Fran from Finance rules out ideas that “sound expensive”. Simon from Sales says the trade never buys into ideas that sound “too weird”. And of course, the most senior leader in the room dismisses ideas that sound “too risky”.
Eureka moments aren’t logical
These are all logical responses. But most creative ideas don’t start with logic, because the issue with logic is that it kills off any breakthrough thinking before it can get going. Early logical criticism of ideas gives the emotional brain no time to make connections and generate more creative ideas. Brilliant ideas get banished in most workshops.
Instead, due to time pressure, you end up with obvious ideas. Evolutionary ideas that tide you over, but which don’t rock the boat.
Fine if you’re a market leader and happy to keep the status quo. However, this won’t work for challenger brands looking to disrupt the market rather than sustain it. You have to change the way you ask people to think about ideas if you want them to have more eureka moments.
Most brilliant ideas – the ones that come from eureka moments – start ugly. They sound expensive, weird and risky, just like your workshop attendees are afraid of. But that’s no reason to kill them off.
If your idea has instinctive and emotional appeal, you can fix all those things later. Logic can help you find an affordable way to make it. A more acceptable way to position it. And a way to reframe risk as opportunity. But an idea that makes logical sense, but which nobody cares about – that’s much harder to fix.
Eureka moments in marketing innovation
Take innovation planning as an example.
When most businesses brainstorm ideas about new products and services, where do they focus?
In Ansoff Matrix terms, it’s almost always in the “market penetration” box.
They look at ways to grow their existing products in their existing markets. New packaging. New advertising. A minor change in the design or service offer to keep the brand fresh.
These aren’t necessarily bad ideas, but they’re not breakthrough ideas. No one will say “eureka” to any of those. Logically, it makes sense to “stick to the knitting”. But that approach only leads to obvious ideas.
Instead, what if you ran regular, separate, smaller sessions where you explored non-obvious ideas? Looking at new categories or selling your products to a different target audience.
How would this work?
First, you’d identify your most open-minded creative people. The ones who regularly come up with ideas that others never think of. You set up these idea sessions and give them a way to capture, store, review and edit ideas with each other. An ideas database that anyone can contribute to. And lastly, you give them permission in this ideas session to be more “playful” with their thinking.
This doesn’t mean stopping your everyday functional and logical improvements. But it does mean giving the emotional brains of your most creative people time and space to have more eureka moments.
Eureka moments in other areas of marketing
You can apply this same approach to any marketing activity that needs more creative thinking. Still fine to do a workshop if you need a logical answer. But if you want more eureka moments, you’ll need to give people’s emotional brains time and space to work.
So, if you’re just starting to build your brand positioning and identity, don’t expect to crack it in a day. Instead, build a series of smaller, more spread-out sessions where you pick off each element one at a time.
Or, when building your communications and customer experience plans, again give yourself time and space to be more creative. Allow your emotional brain to think about how you could turn your problem into an opportunity. The more time you give your emotional brain to work, the more eureka moments you’ll have.
Conclusion - How to have more marketing eureka moments
Eureka moments are great when they happen, but frustrating when you’re waiting for them to happen. And while you can’t change how your brain works, there are things you can do to make it easier to have eureka moments.
Remember that eureka moments come from the emotional rather than logical part of your brain. So logically “thinking harder” is using the wrong tool for the job. In fact, it gets in the way of the right tool, your emotional brain.
The answer lies in building better creative habits. Giving the emotional brain time and space to creatively solve challenges. That might be distracting your logical brain with something else. Or changing your creative thinking process to give your most creative people more time and space to have eureka moments.
Check our breakthrough ideas article for more on this. Or get in touch if you need help to have even more eureka moments.
Photo Credits
Light bulb : Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash
Woman with mug reading : Photo by Alexandra Fuller on Unsplash
Business meeting : Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Surprised Monkey : Photo by Jamie Haughton on Unsplash
Happy woman : Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
