5 Insights from Inventors

Inventors think about things that don’t yet exist; that aren’t there. They operate on a different frequency. 

They iterate, incubate, massage, manipulate and relentlessly test ideas. They seek to fix things and fill voids. Some ideas are radical, some incremental, some innovative, some ingenious, some inventive, some derivative, and some inexplicable. Some become prototypes though far fewer become viable products. 

Inventors can’t rest and can’t except the status quo. They have to fix it, find it, create it, built it, fabricate it, re-route it, re-wire it and make something new. 

Here’s 5 marketing lessons these guys taught me. 

Experience is Everything. We are sentient creatures. How we feel determines what we want and what we do. Feelings drive us. Marketers have to communicate or stimulate feelings to move the needle. 

Everything is Filtered.  There are no fresh or new experiences. Language, culture, experience, media and context filter everything. Every communications choice – words, color, image, music, tone, face etc – hits pre-set buttons which condition the response. 

Before we start, some part of the target audience has already made up their mind.  Each individual brings a huge bag of pre-judgments to every experience and every message. Knowing nuances and idioms, improves our chance for breaking through. 

People React Predictably. There’s no better barometer of human nature than watching random consumers react to something new. You can almost see the mental gears grinding as people sort, filter, file and compare the new thing against their stored databank of information and experiences. 

Some are surprised. Some instinctively point out the flaws or speculate about the downside while others instantly riff on the new thing suggesting features, changes, colors, applications and functions to make it better. 

By understanding and planning for the spectrum of predictable reactions, marketers can anticipate how we experience the new and to shape both the initial presentations and the follow-up messages. 

We Live in a Tower of Babel. It is very difficult to frame a single idea and communicate it to a wide range of people who come from different places, think differently, use words differently and hear differently. The inherent difficulty of framing and transmitting commercial messages hits you in the face. There are few common understandings about what is funny, cool, sad or ironic. 

It’s All About Differentiation. What’s new, what’s different, what’s better and why should I care are inventors’ and marketers’ challenges. If it isn’t different or different enough it dies. Marketers must exert as much effort and creativity into positioning and framing the difference as inventors must in creating something different.  

 

Comments

[christopherdar]

You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found that most people will agree with you.

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