What Frogs And Soap Can Do For Your Business!

Ideas, ideas, ideas - the lifeblood of any business. Stay in one position too long and you are dead! Today's market place requires constant change, new angles, different products, fresh presentations, original advertising slogans. In short it requires business creativity. It requires creativity in advertising. But how do you get them? You can spend thousands of dollars paying the pros to deliver slick advertising slogans. You can pay web site designer generous fees for original designs. But how many small business owners have that kind of budget? The alternative is to use an extremely valuable piece of apparatus which right now is as close to you as close can be. What? Your brain! The human brain is a constant source of amazement to scientists. Each of the 10 billion neurons has a possibility of making connections to the number of 1 with 28 zeros after it. So the total number of connections which can be made through electro-chemical processes is pretty well limitless. Regular thought patterns form channels in the mind, much like a path formed through frequent pedestrian traffic across a field. This has benefits. We don't have to deliberate about every minor decision every day. However, there is a danger! If our thinking falls into ruts when considering important areas of our lives and business, our creativity is stifled. The good news is this: You do not have to be a genius to come up with creative ideas, break out of the rut and start thinking "outside the box". You just need to kick start your brain by providing outside stimuli to get it to think in ways it hasn't before. This can be accomplished by associating totally unrelated subjects together and observing what reactions come from the fusion! This method, applied to our business can be a fertile source of ideas. Let's do a little exercise to illustrate. Supposing you need fresh ideas, words, phrases, for an advertising campaign. Choose any word at random. For the exercise we will use the word FROG. Even better, get a picture of one. Now start writing furiously on a clear sheet of paper anything and everything that comes into your mind to do with frogs. Here goes: green, slimy, jump, legs, leap, croak, tad poles, metamorphosis, reeds, water, bull, tree, wide-mouth, eyes, smell, slippery, cold, kermit, spawn, eggs, jelly. Take one of those words and explore further if you wish: Legs - long, jointed, tasty, delicacy, spring, fold. Mind Mapping is an excellent tool for this kind of exercise. Review the mind mapping handbook here: (Book review: http://www.vitalstop.com/br-mindmap.htm) Now you look at your advertising subject. Are you selling software? Then start making some connections: Leap frog your business with ------- Jump ahead of the competition with ------------- Blow your competition out of the water with ----- Spring load your business using ----------------- STOP business slipping through your fingers with this! Just keep on cranking out phrases until you have a heap. Then? Boil them all down to the best ten, best five. Then start testing them until you find the winner! OK, so most of them will bomb! But then again, one, and you only need one, could just skyrocket! Often it happens without any logical explanation. Sometimes you come up with a real slick idea which gets nowhere. Other times a seemingly mediocre slogan takes off! Can anyone explain that? No. So testing is essential to success. Let's take another direction and apply the same idea to web site design. Do you want to change the look of your site? Do you have reasonable computer skills so you can save yourself a large fee and at the same time produce a professional looking site? Good. But what theme to use? How can you be different? Take another word at random, SOAP, or again a picture if you have one from a glossy magazine. Let's start listing every word we can think of to do with soap: Flakes, scent, pink, white, marble, skin, bubbles, soft, round, square, gentle, perfume, liquid, toilet, bathroom, sink, bottle, creamy, model, block, water, wash, towel, bar. Now, do any of those words give you ideas for texture, color, shape? For an interesting navigation bar, could you incorporate some different shapes based on bars of soap? The idea of bubbles has much potential. Links in bubbles, different size bubbles according to importance of the link. Could an attractive picture of a model help present a feature of the site? Could a liquid dispenser bottle be used in a graphic in some way? After thinking carefully on these lines you could come up with a very original, slick, attractive design for a web site or whatever project you are working on. So back to our title - What Frogs and Soap Can Do For Your Business! No, these are not the ramblings of a crank! These ideas are used by big companies who have millions of dollars set aside for advertising. Check out for yourself a book full of resources on business creativity and creativity in advertising. - Jump Start Your Brain (Book review: http://www.vitalstop.com/br-jumpstart.htm) Why not mimic the big boys and do a little creative thinking yourself? Sit down with a sheet of paper and turn on that amazing thinking apparatus between the ears - your brain! You will be amazed at the effect on your business!