Remember hydraulic-powered car doors that ascend into the heavens like bat wings? They’ve been a fixture in our vision of cars of the future since Back to the Future, a little piece of pop culture that predicted where we’d end up when flying cars came to fruition. I’ve always taken these lifting car doors as a matter of fact. “They aren’t available en masse yet,” I’d always think to myself, “but soon car doors will all operate like this.”
As it turns out, many people think this way, but there’s usually someone who jumps in and shatters our preconceptions with new ideas. These are the innovators of the world, and they often end up creating products that change everything. Take the car door example I mentioned earlier as an example. The company in the video below doesn’t think car doors show fly up like wings. They think doors should slide downward and retract into the car (somewhat 80’s seeming video below).
Pretty brilliant, right? In order for this to happen someone had to reject the given wing door idea of the future so that they had enough room to envision something else, something different, and something that might make even more sense.
The same thing happens in marketing. Thousands of people have told us that “Facebook marketing is supposed to look exactly like this” or “Tweets must be constructed like that.” If you follow these tried and true formulas you’ll do well, but you risk looking like everyone else. The marketers who dare to step outside of the mold to create something all of their own though, are the ones who often strike it rich. These are the marketers who, at the end of the day, create the groundbreaking changes.
Think about it like this. If you use social networks or consider yourself a good cocktail conversationalist, what is it that you bring to the conversation? What topics do you talk about, what do you want your audience to feel? If you’re like most people, you want to let your audience in on something new. Maybe it’s funny, maybe it’s cool, but whatever that “new” thing is, we’re looking to create that “Wow” moment in our audience.
The things that create that feeling are often outside of the norm. They don’t always catch on, but when they do they go viral and they go big. That retractable car door for example? The video itself may be a little weird, but it does have 10 million views. That’s like 2,000 times more than the typical highly produced luxury brand marketing video released on Youtube.
Thinking outside of the box really does pay off.