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!