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MOBILE ENTERTAINMENT

In 1977 I took a ski trip with my boys to Courchevel in the French Alps. They brought along two fairly small, blue metal boxes with headphones. “Listen to this, Dad,” they said. I did, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. These small boxes would change music and define a generation. Consider the Walkman in the days before music started being burned on CDs and the portable tape player gave way to the CD Walkman. Notice the ubiquity of the name: No one calls this device “a portable stereo cassette player with miniature headphones.” We call it a Walkman.

How did that happen? Again, through a brilliant piece of nonlinear thinking and a great creative leap. Many know the name Akio Morita, the founder of Sony. Lesser known is his cofounder, Masura Ibuka, the engineering counterpart to Morita’s marketing genius. In 1979, in one part of the company, people were developing a new technology for portable cassette drives; in another, they were working on lightweight headphones for outdoor use. This was not proprietary technology—other companies were working on smaller headphones and portable cassette drives. However, only Sony had Masura Ibuka, the guy who made the creative leap and put the two together.6

When Ibuka approached Morita with the idea, it was in the form of a personal request—he wanted to put headphones on a portable stereo tape player so that he could listen to music without bothering people around him. Morita immediately saw something Ibuka had not: the potential for a new product that would change the way people consume music. He had long ago made the observation that young people loved music so much they would go to great lengths to take it with them, even to the point of lugging cumbersome portable stereos around. Now he would give them the ability to listen to that music anywhere and everywhere. This breakthrough solution, an industry first, would transform the marketplace. And it all came from the leap of putting together headphones and a portable tape player.

What these examples have in common is that they are all great creative leaps leading to business strategy. And they are all rooted in nonlinear thinking. One could not have arrived at any of these breakthrough ideas by following a strictly linear thought process.

BEFORE YOU LEAP:
? Toss out all your preconceptions and prejudices. Creative Business Ideas know no limits.They need not be connected to any traditional discipline within advertising or marketing. They could be as unusual as . . . building a bridge.
? Invent desire and be steadfast in your focus. Half a century ago, drivers were looking for sex appeal, not safety. What might consumers value tomorrow?
? Build “sense-ational” experiences. Create a world in which consumers can see, touch, smell, and taste your brand. Provide them with conversational currency in the form of new adventures and exposure to
new ways of living and thinking.
? Color outside the lines.Turn a commodity into a brand. A brand into an experience. An experience into a connection.
? Let them know you are there. Not every brand can be seen, but they all can be heard.
? Pay attention to your own needs and desires and to those of people you know. If you would buy it, chances are lots of other people would, too.

Taken from : “Leap” A Revolution in Creative Business Strategy

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