Be Careful Not To Rush Into Outside The Box Thinking

There is a great Monty Python skit where a man is addressing a crowd that obviously will do anything he commands. The crowd acts only as a group, with no individual ever speaking on his or her own. The man addressing them is trying to get them to think on their own, without his help. You do not need to follow me, he says. You do not need to follow anybody! Youve got to think for yourselves. You are all individuals

The crowd responds by answering, in one voice, Yes! We are all individuals!

This is a perfect depiction of how many businesspeople act. They declare themselves to be independent thinkers, while in reality they are conforming to the same old (ineffective) norms. They say they are thinking outside the box, unable to see that they are still hopelessly lost inside of the box.

This is why we so many of the same, tired advertising flyers all over the place. Every company thinks it is doing something new and unique, but they are not. How do you avoid this trap, and truly invigorate your flyer printing with effective techniques? Well, you have to first understand what is not working for so many other companies.

A common problem with businesspeople who are trying to think outside the box is that they do not first understand what is inside the box. To use a clich, they are failing to see the forest for the trees. They are so enamored with coming up with something new and innovative, that they are completely ignoring some simple solutions that are staring them right in the face.

Before you commit yourself to stepping outside of the box, take a good long look at the inside of it. You might just find some things there that will help you right away with your advertising.

For example, before you try to come up with the next great full color flyer, look at some flyers for companies that have succeeded. There are many businesses that have launched effective ad campaigns, and you would do well to emulate them in some respects. Most successful advertising flyers are colorful and printed by high-quality flyer printing companies. Do yourself a favor and follow that inside the box trend. There are some tried and true techniques that actually work. Too many companies, in their rush to jump outside of the box, tend to ignore those things.

Now, if you are confident and I mean truly confident that you know you are doing all of the old techniques that do work, and you are avoiding all of the old tricks that do not work, you can safely proceed to leave your box. Even then, however, you need to do it in a planned way. Dont just burst out of the box and expect mind-shattering results to smack you in the face.

If you go crazy with brainstorming new and untried advertising tricks, you may end up with so many ideas that none of them stick. Or, worse yet, you will put together a campaign that is so jumbled that it fails miserably. You have to have a plan when you are trying a new approach. In other words, you have to put your outside the box thinking in a box.

The trick to this is to be organized. Find a small group of advisors the key word here is small and come up with a short list of new ideas. Then act on those ideas, and only those ideas. Focus on these few things, and, if they dont work, you can go back and think up some new ones.

Once you have decided on the short list of outside the box ideas that you are going to work on, organize some more. Divide the tasks needed to complete the job into sections, and assign each section to a small group (the key word, again, is small). The less a group has to focus on, the better they can complete that task. If you give people too much to think about, they get confused; thats just human nature.

There you go: a new way at looking at the outside the box phenomenon.



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