My Recipe for Marketing Success; Lateral Thinking

You’ve probably heard the term; “Think outside the box!” many times in your life. You’ll probably ignore it next time you hear it, again. Maybe it will remind you a brand, or a cliche quote.

For a few minutes, forget about “Think outside the box” cliche, and let’s talk about some history.

The history of humanity is the witness to great inventors, warriors, empires, kings, scientists, and smartest people who have done something remarkable during their life time. These people left a remark to the humanity, not just lived an average life.

Yes, some of them are geniuses, and some just were luckier than their peers.

But, have you ever thought about the common characteristics of the greatest people in the world history?

Is it being the smartest? or being workaholics? or being great leaders?

The answer is; none of the above.

The correct answer is;

All the greatest people in human history were lateral thinkers.

Lateral Thinking is the Key Ingredient of Creativity

When I was at high school, I had an AP Calculus teacher who wasn’t very popular along the students. Instead of showing us how to solve a tough calculus problem, her main focus was to show as many possible different ways to solve the same problem.

At the calculus exams, whoever solved the problem with the most common way used along the others would fail even if the answer was correct, and you would only get a high score if you had the most unique way of solving the problem.

We were too young and inexperienced to understand the value of this approach, but did our best to come up with alternative methods to solve the exact same problem.

Can You Become a Great Lateral Thinker?

Lateral thinking is not like leadership. You don’t need to have the skills in your genes. You can keep practicing, and improve your lateral thinking skills.

The easiest way to start is with brainstorming. Try to come up with alternative ideas to the regular, daily and usual things you observe in your personal and business life.

You don’t need to start implementing these right away, but when you start to train your brain’s right side for alternative approaches in daily life, it will be easier to adopt lateral thinking culture in the long run.

How to Implement Lateral Thinking to Your Daily Life?

Most of your business & personal life relies on Problem Solving. Your goal should be to try to look at the daily problems from a different perspective. Just like my high school calculus teacher, try very hard to come up with alternative ways to solve the daily problems.

Since I’m in marketing, my lateral thinking examples are usually about marketing topics. Here are just a few ideas to get you started. Real life examples are always better than textbooks. So, here we go;

• How we’ve sold 13 times more coffee within 2 months

A few years ago when we were trying to sell more Turkish Coffee, we’ve faced a bottleneck in the marketing plan. There were only a limited number of people in the US who even heard about Turkish Coffee. The niche market was limited, and already dominated by us (and another competitor).

With a simple lateral thinking session, I’ve come up with a new marketing plan to target only “Espresso Drinkers”. Espresso market was much much larger than our market, and we were so sure that if an espresso lover tried Turkish Coffee, they’d love it and become a returning customer.

After running our marketing campaign for over 2 months, our Turkish Coffee sales have increased over 1200%. Yes, you’ve heard it right. We’ve sold 13 times more Turkish Coffee than we used to sell before wearing our lateral thinking cap.

This is just a simple lateral thinking example while you are approaching niche markets.

• Debt Consolidation Services Marketing Success

When I was new to affiliate marketing, one of the niches I’ve researched was “debt consolidation services”. There was so much competition in the niche, it was close to impossible to turn a profit with PPC traffic (for a beginner).

But, I knew so much about debt. While I was a student, I was in both credit card and school loan debt. I knew how to help people in debt with my real life experience.

Instead of trying to sell a debt consolidation service site, I’ve created a simple blog sharing my story. I’ve posted step by step how I’ve gotten out of debt with recommendations to services/products I’ve used. Such as books to change my financial mindset, a few digital products to get my finances organized, etc.

People loved my blog, and my organic traffic kept increasing every single day. With some simple lateral thinking, instead of diving into an uber competitive niche, I’ve come up with an alternative solution which mad me money while helped people to really get out of debt.

• Craigslist Marketing Example

I’ve written a pretty long post about my craigslist marketing example, so I won’t be rewriting about it here.

Feel free to read it to get another example of successful marketing idea due to lateral thinking.

Above are just 3 simple real life examples of lateral thinking from my personal experiences. I hope they will get you started with your own brainstorming.

Keep Following the Trends or Start Setting the Trends

Whether you have a local business, a 9 to 5 job, or simply trying to make money online, today is the day to make a decision:

Will you settle with the word; average in your business and personal life, keep following trends set by others, or will you start working on lateral thinking to make a change and start setting trends in whatever you do?

Further Reading Recommendations about Lateral Thinking

I’d love to hear your real life successful lateral thinking marketing examples. Please share at the comments section below. If you got stuck and need lateral thinking ideas, why don’t you also share them, and we can start some brainstorming and try to help.

Photo Credit: Holger Eileby