It's a key source of humor. It makes people crazy. It's scary when it involves your fortune. And it's a great source of new ideas that make people go, "Wow!"
Through the joys of the Twitterverse, a friend told me about "Dictator Goods," which offers a line of "greeting cards" featuring some rather dark quotes from some even darker historical figures. The cover seems normal and benign enough. "Gratitude" it says, elegantly letter-pressed on rich cotton stock. Then you open it up to see the rest of a quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: "...is a sickness suffered by dogs."
"Wow," indeed. That gets your attention!
While I'm not sure I'd send these out as thank you notes to my clients, these cards are a perfect demonstration of the principle of "reversal" that is useful when generating ideas. The reversal principle works like this:
1) Consider your product or category
example 1: thank you note cards
example 2: Dentyne Ice Mints
2) Take an attribute of the product/category
example 1: thank you note cards make people feel appreciated
example 2: Dentyne Ice mints provides cooling refreshment
3) Completely reverse the attribute
example 1: add a quote that makes people feel that appreciation is over-rated!
example 2: and thus were born Dentyne FIRE mints that provides the spicy hotness of cinnamon
Try it for your offering. Put yourself into a divergent mindset (defer judgment, strive for 30 ideas, combine and build on ideas, seek wild ideas). Then think about a key attribute of your offering, and see what happens when you completely reverse it. You may not get a "Wow!" right away, but you never know when you'll come up with something compelling like:
- Chocolate that contains something savory
- Computers that you write on like an actual paper note-pad
- An entire audience cheering for the wicked witch instead of Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz"
After all, remember that when you reverse "wow," you get "wow!"