Unpopular opinion, bad ideas are building blocks to great ones. There’s probably a groundbreaking idea in your bad idea.
What’s your definition of a “bad idea”?
Bad ideas could easily translate to innovative, weird, bizarre, strange; and if there’s anything we’ve learnt from innovation and digital evolution, most of what we see now that are widely accepted, came to be as a result of some weird, genius thinking.
As a writer, creative director, digital marketer, designer, and so on, your excellence lies in your ability to come up with ideas that people have never really ever thought about; or your ability to fish out a competitive edge in an existing idea.
To excel as a digital marketer, one of the most important bedrocks is creativity, which stems from the ability to come up with cutting-edge ideas. You “sweat it” as a digital marketer because the onus is on you to yield positive results for your brand through the adoption of creative approaches as it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with customer expectations and maintain a competitive edge.
Why? Because consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated; and technological advancements, as well as new ideas are constantly changing the concept of digital marketing as a whole.
“When I am working on some new thinking I often, and I mean often, will say to myself (while laughing) ‘That’s a crap idea’ and then keep on going. The more bad ones that come out the closer you are to finding the good ones,” said Rodd Chant.
“There’s an old saying – ‘You have to take the bad with the good. Those words speak the truth. When it comes to developing good ideas you need to come up with more bad ideas. Why? Well it’s a numbers game. The pursuit of elusive ideas, the good ones, is not an exact science, there are no calculations that will take you to your answer every time, you need to put in some effort and accept the inevitable – you’ll come up with a lot of ideas that suck.”
