Companies insist that the way we have been working for years is the only way we can continue to apply, and we are afraid of change for fear of playing with new rules to which we are not used.
However, there are techniques that are giving results and that we must dare to put into practice before the market loss is so evident that there is no longer a remedy. And lateral marketing is a new way of facing the market with very new approaches.
I have repeated it a thousand times in my lectures over the years: You have to apply different ideas to achieve different results.
The human being is the only one who tries to achieve these different results by doing the same. However, this concept that seems so simple when you hear it, is complicated when you want to internalize it and we only see it applicable to others.
Sometimes in companies we insist on continuing to do the same for years seeing the market share decline without daring to apply surgery, and we prefer to continue in the same line that has worked for us long ago, instead of putting the situation on top of the table with the conviction to solve it even if this includes measures of change. That is the great word that so scares human beings in general and managers in particular. Change.
Managers, general directors or department directors, many times we prefer to see how this disease is spreading through our veins and we look the other way, we avoid going to the doctor and do some good blood and urine tests, a good electrocardiogram, a scanner, some contrast tests, so as not to know that we are sick, as if ignorance were to heal us and end the problems we have. Deep down, we are still like children when they cover their eyes and say "I'm not here" because not being able to see them, they think they have disappeared too.
In the 21st century company, we cannot maintain that attitude of the 19th century entrepreneur who limited himself to finding a product and manufacturing it until he stopped ordering. No, we must be aware that we live in a changing world, that new technologies and developments appear every day that give the market a twist, opening new paths and of course new opportunities that someone will take advantage of.
We have to realize that the market in general is increasingly demanding, that it is no longer satisfied with having a good product, but also wants that product to be adapted to its needs, and that it be ecological, and that the manufacture of it It has not been done in third world countries to take advantage of the exploitation of people who, due to their tremendous primary needs, are willing to work in subhuman conditions and only in exchange for being able to feed themselves.
The consumer of the 21st century does not want a product that he likes, he wants to be proposed new solutions that give him a better quality of life, that save him time, that he perceives that it has been made with him in mind.
And all that happens because we stop thinking that our decrease in sales is solely because the competition has made a more attractive container, or the new flavor or color that we have launched has not reached the impact on the consumer as we expected. That approach is wrong in many of the cases.
The solution is to take different paths, to redesign our company, to adapt to this new environment where we must be on the same side of the consumer and preferably be creative to dare to give them what they need, apply the new marketing strategies that are already in place. applying other companies (see article "7 winning strategies in 21st Century Marketing"), goes through daring to rethink our business model and even adapt it to this new type of client, goes through focusing on more specific market niches (see article "Market niches, the basis of success on the Internet") and invest time and money in knowing those niches to give you the solutions you need. And the concept is the same on and off the Internet.
And that means closing or parking at least parts of the company to invest in creating alternatives, and the difficult thing is that you have to have the courage to do so. I know that it is very easy to say and that when the money is at stake the decision is more complicated, but I only ask one question, is it preferable to let the disease kill me or is it better to cut my leg if that saves me from death? I personally think that the second option is harder but it is almost always more effective.
And when I say apply new ideas, I mean to reimagine both the processes and the products or services that we offer, to apply lateral marketing techniques that are giving such good results.
The first time I read it to Edward de Bono in his book "Lateral Thinking" I was astounded by the perspective he was taking, but when I heard him in person, his simple approach struck me in such a way and I suddenly saw that he was a The process was so sharp that my mind was opened taking a significant quantitative leap.
Lateral thinking says something as simple as that the solution is not to do better, but to do it differently. A great phrase if there is nothing behind it but in this case there is a whole new way of thinking about the world.
A few months later I read Philip Kotler in the book "Lateral Marketing" that he has written together with Trias de Bes, and my mental horizon widened again, but it was not long afterwards, when I had the privilege of being able to listen to him at a conference and a workshop, where I personally had a small talk with him and that was where I definitely understood how it could be applied to almost any product or service, and again I took a leap up my ladder of thought, since a series has been developed of processes to be able to apply it that if practiced give surprising results. And it is not an exaggeration.
To understand it better I will give an example. If we manufacture yoghurts, traditional or vertical marketing would lead us to design a new container with attractive colors or lines more adapted to the type of consumer; or a new division of yogurts with African fruits; to create new containers of different sizes; etc., to give some examples.
However, lateral marketing leads us to forget about this approach and offering us three approaches: product, market and marketing mix, and above them 6 ways to create "empty situations" based on the product we have. And from there, unlikely ideas can come up, such as a yogurt in bars that you carry in your pocket; a barrel of liquid yogurt that with a tap like the one for water and a dispenser, would allow us to have more at our disposal. I know that these ideas may seem absurd but that is the way to come up with some that are sufficiently creative and possible that allow us to get out of the fight with our current competition and be able to suddenly enter new divisions or categories that did not even exist until now. moment.
At Fénix Media we are applying this form of approach to both our own company and that of our clients in very different sectors, and the approaches that we are proposing are surprising you greatly, since these strategies or that way of rethinking your own company had never been considered, since it is equally valid for a wood importer, for a store of erotic articles, a digital newspaper and a business school.
Yes, even for concepts as conventional as a Business School you may have unlikely prospects that will make you take a leap over your competition and in a few months position yourself in a totally different place even without abandoning the business you have lived up to now. There are hundreds of examples that we will discuss in future articles, you just have to know the techniques, apply them and find a way to bridge the gaps that occur in this process, or what is the same, our products or services with new ideas, but for that there are also very simple techniques.
Lateral thinking breaks the logic that we have learned and used for decades with vertical thinking, but this transgression allows us to find new paths that we had not seen before.
Vertical thinking creates patterns for us and adapts the news to what it knows, while the lateral is willing to explore these new situations to see where they lead. There are 10 very clear main differences.
To begin, I will say that the way in which it is put forward by Edward de Bono, creator of lateral thinking, is substantially different from the approach taken by Philip Kotler, who focuses solely on marketing and developing specific techniques for this discipline. I am going to try to convey both approaches because the really important thing is to understand the concept, and only then can we move on to the techniques. We will start by analyzing De Bono's approach and in future articles we will continue with Kotler to see the differences and how they both provide us with similar patterns and complementary tools.
De Bono argues that lateral thinking has to come from exploring paths that would go unnoticed in a normal trajectory of our life, and from there, finding the connection with the path that we usually travel.
To understand it better, as always, I will try to illustrate it with an example: Let's imagine that we started from point A on a one-way highway, with six lanes to ourselves, and on which we have driven hundreds of times. We know it perfectly, every straight, every curve, so we can go quite fast without feeling that we are putting our lives in danger. Let's imagine that in a curve that turns to the right, on the left side of the road, behind a mountain, one day a new and narrow local dirt road appears, but given the highway we are going through, the habit of traveling it and the speed that we carry, the most normal thing is that this path goes unnoticed without us noticing. Well the news is that entering that road, a few hundred meters from the fork,would be the point B to which we should go.
Indeed, I know what you are thinking, and that is that if nobody tells us that this path exists, we can hardly intuit that it will appear. Right. But now imagine another situation, in which we will see how the mind works.
Imagine that on one side you have a glass box, in which we have filled the bottom with a deep layer of gelatin. On the other hand we have an inkwell full of very hot ink that we are going to spill little by little on that gelatin. When pouring the ink on the gelatin, the heat will melt it slightly, making a small depression and there it would remain making a small puddle.
Imagine that we empty the ink and repeat the action with the hot ink, and we continue to pour ink into the box but this time we are going to drop it a few centimeters away from the place where we did it the first time, and again we will see that the gelatin melts a little, but being so close to the previous place, a groove is created that joins with the depression of the first time, making it even a little deeper.
If we do it for the third time, moving a little further away, the same effect of the second time will be repeated, making a trail that ends at the place of the first ink and that at this point has already become a deeper hole.
Well the mind works the same way. The mind creates patterns, and once it has created them, whatever comes to it that it understands to be different, it adapts to fit that pattern. The dominant ideas prevent us from creating new situations because they mark the path of our efforts and we will have to transgress them and do what De Bono calls a provocation, in order to achieve what we want, that is, new ways of thinking, and therefore different results.
If we had a trained ant and we asked it to get from the base of a leafy tree to a certain leaf that is on a small branch of that tree, the normal thing is that it would not arrive and get lost along the way, as it would have a good chance of being wrong branch, but nevertheless it would be much easier to do it in reverse and go down from that leaf to reach the base of the tree. And the same happens with the road that we talked about before, because from that dirt road it is very easy to get to the highway and from there to the starting point A.
And all this explanation for what? Well, to understand that once the idea is generated, it will seem incredible to us that we had not thought about it before, because the path that will unite it with the current reality will be very simple.
The great difficulty is not understanding that there is lateral thinking, but getting used to applying it to our way of seeing the world, since we are used to focusing everything under vertical thinking and that in most cases prevents us from adopting lateral thinking.
Let's imagine that we had glasses with blue lenses on and we had seen the world with them 24 hours a day for the last 20 years without taking them off. How would we see everything? Blue, right? We would be so used to seeing everything in that color that we hardly even realize that we see it blue, surely we would have forgotten it and we would think that everything is that color by nature. But now I come, and I tell you that I have glasses with which the world looks much more beautiful, and although you look at me strangely and you can barely understand me, I offer them to you to try them, to which you agree I have convinced that you should at least try them.
You put them on and suddenly you see that everything is different, that its color has changed, that now you see everything with another color. Everything is Green! Everything is new for you, but nevertheless, the problem is that my glasses are not green, they are yellow, and you have not yet taken off the blue ones with which you have always looked at the world, so you still do not see what I am. I was saying.
The real difficulty lies in realizing that we are wearing blue glasses before we can try yellow ones. And those glasses have notable differences from each other.
And what differences am I talking about? Well, let's quickly list them:
| VERTICAL THINKING | SIDE THOUGHT |
| Vertical thinking moves only if there is a direction to move. | Lateral thinking moves to create direction. |
| Vertical thinking knows what it is looking for. | The lateral thinker searches but does not know what he is looking for until he finds it. |
| Vertical thinking is analytical. | Lateral thinking is provocative. |
| Vertical thinking is based on the sequence of ideas. | Lateral thinking can and should jump. |
| In vertical thinking, negation is used to block bifurcations. | In lateral thinking, no path is rejected and all are explored, no matter how absurd they may seem. |
| In vertical thinking, what seems unrelated to the topic is excluded. | In lateral thinking, even what seems totally alien to the subject is investigated. |
| In vertical thinking the categories, classifications and labels are fixed. | In lateral thinking they never are. |
| In vertical thinking the most obvious paths are followed. | In thought, the less obvious are sought. |
| Vertical thinking is a finite process. | Lateral thinking is a probabilistic process. |
Lateral thinking is a new way of conceiving the approach of our brain, it is a different way of approaching situations, it is the new way of using creativity without following the logical patterns of vertical thinking.
These will be the parameters on which we will be based, and in the next articles we will see several tools that will help us challenge that logical sequence, allowing us to open paths that you can never know where they will lead us, in the meantime, I recommend that you go training your brain and teaching it that there is a new gymnastics that will get you in shape and that if you want to advance and discover new territories never known before, you must dare to step out of your comfort circle to make it bigger.
Lateral thinking has different ways of putting it into practice depending on the approaches we take. In this case it is the checklist technique and the six points that we must challenge to generate these new ideas:
Dominant Ideas
Boundaries or Limits
Assumptions
Essential
Factors Avoidance Factors
Polarization
We are going to work on one of the tools that Edward de Bono left us as a way to attack the usual approaches, that is, our blue glasses. I am going to explain it with an example, although it is just that, an example so that it is better understood, but which is applicable to any other situation, product, service or approach to life.
Of the challenges that are going to be posed, all the ideas that arise are valid, although ultimately not all will lead to a happy ending, but in principle, all are admitted because you never know what they may lead to and what other ideas may appear as fruit of these first.
As in a brainstorming session, no idea is evicted or dismissed, no matter how absurd it may seem a priori, although the main differences between lateral thinking and it are that here we will work on specific parameters and directions to be challenged and that He can perform both individually and in a group, and he in BS is just a launch of ideas in a group and the chain that is generated every time our brain hears those ideas and generates new ones but without specific parameters or challenges. There are many people who confuse them, but they are fundamentally different.
Checklists
To challenge them, challenge them, challenge them and enter into lateral thinking escaping the vertical.
The example idea on which we are going to work is that we want to establish a Hotel in the center of the city and we are going to analyze each point and challenge them one by one to see where they lead us.
Dominant Ideas.- If we think about the dominant ideas of a Hotel in the center of the city, things like these immediately come up:
Good comunicated.
Belonging to a prestigious chain.
It has additional services that customers may demand: concierge, laundry, ironing, etc…
Rooms are rented for days.
There is a reception, a hall, cafeteria, etc.
Challenges: If we challenge these dominant ideas and start to think that they don't have to be, suddenly others like these may appear:
- Different prices entering after 8:00 p.m. Prices per hour, such as a car park. Renting rooms for naps only.
And many more.
Borders or Limits.- The normal thing is to think that the borders or limits of a hotel are in its walls and outside of there it does not exist.
Challenges:
- Take the hotel out of its walls, for example to the airport having an area where you can disappoint, rest, or simply take a shower Why can't you start the hotel at the airport doing the reception of data there and taking charge of picking up the suitcases and take them directly to your room without it being mandatory for the guest to physically go to register? That would give the customer more possibilities. Why can't the hotel end up at the boarding desk and take over the check-in of suitcases as an added value, avoiding wasting time for its customer?
Assumptions.- They are those things that we take for granted when we think about that situation or service we are talking about.
A hotel is supposed to be for sleeping.
It is supposed to be for people who come from another city and who need a place to leave their belongings and rest.
A hotel is supposed to have all the rooms in the same building.
A hotel is supposed to be the entire building of the same category 3 stars, 4 stars, etc.
It is assumed that a hotel belongs entirely to a single chain.
Challenges:
- Renting rooms for naps (we see this idea being repeated in different sections, perhaps it is not so far-fetched, because if we are tourists, we are tired of walking, and our hotel is far away, for a small price we could accept that rent, avoiding loss time going to ours and the cost of paying a taxi).Does you have rooms adequately prepared in buildings other than the hotel, maybe for those naps? Rent rooms for meetings, with table, telecommunications (telephone, fax and Internet), refrigerator and exclusive hostess service like a stadium box. Rent relaxation rooms with a jacuzzi, a comfortable sofa where we can lie down and music where we can spend a couple of hours.Have 3-star areas and 4-star areas accessible by different elevators to capture different types of public and economic level.Have areas set in different formulas that vary by plants or by seasons of the year.
Essential Factors.- What do we all consider to be essential factors in a hotel? The beds; the reception; bathroom; the closets; cleaning people, etc.
Challenges:
- If it is only for naps, no cabinets are needed. If it is only for showering, we do not need a bed. If we automate it, we may not need reception, just as we can check in a "low cost" flight without going through the counter the airline.
Avoidance Factors.- What do hotels want to avoid at all costs? Avoid theft; bad image; troubled people; that people leave after 12: 00h. To clean the rooms for the next guest; the crowds at reception; overcrowding or queues in restaurants and cafeteria; noise; etc.
Challenges:
- Specify schedules for breakfasts and meals with reservation of tables as in a restaurant with discounts at times where it is usually emptier. Offer the possibility of checking out at different times with different prices and not all at 12:00 p.m. hotel products: towels; bathrobes; dryers; and even quilts, paintings or lamps. Create a noisy hotel because it is a hotel for parties, and have multiple lounges and clubs for rent just for that, parties.
Polarization.- We see the hotel as something rigid, inflexible in methods. The archetype is a reception on the ground floor, the cafeteria near that reception, the restaurant on the first floor or first basement, the pool in a basement, etc.
Challenges:
- If we put the cafeteria on the top or one of the top floors with a different elevator than the rooms and that goes directly, we can promote its exceptional views and branding the hotel brand, attracting new customers who will talk about it. on the top floor with removable roof for summer and winter Sell rooms as time-sharing Sell to companies or individuals who travel regularly, a voucher with 10 rooms for a year in the hotel chain Sell rooms to companies, from such that only additional services are paid: cleaning; laundry; Room Service; etc.
As we have seen in this example, many ideas are raised but not all equally valid once analyzed, but they must be studied because many of the times what we find is that this absurd idea suddenly finds a way to unite that void that I spoke to you in previous articles with reality, and a lateral thought arises that opens a new concept that gives a quantitative leap over what has existed up to now.
Many of those that have been raised could be applied, and even though I am not an expert in hotels and restaurants, I see that they would be worth spending time to study them more thoroughly, however others will not take us beyond the idea itself launched, and therefore, although we will study them, we will end up leaving them parked until the next time.
And now it is necessary for me to be well understood: those that we will leave parked, we should never dismiss them for being ideas that do not work, far from it, they have only been ideas that we have not been able to find a way to connect that void now, but that in the future it may appear and be useful to us.
This is one of the tools and we have seen the process applied to a project, but it can also be applied to a company, a service, or even a process, for example, taking a flight.
Let's imagine that we are dedicated to that sector and we want to innovate, therefore we think about that complete process, from the moment the customer buys the ticket, prepares the suitcases, gets in his car or a taxi with his luggage, arrives at the airport, invoices, passes control, enter the plane, sit down, fly, get off the plane, wait for baggage claim, order a taxi and go home or to your hotel. Well, we can choose one of the points of the process and apply everything we have been seeing to it, and if it does not satisfy us, we can apply it at each step until we find something that really involves that leap.
It is a whole new way of seeing and living life and companies, thinking about how to make them different and stop thinking about improving what we already have.
Lateral Marketing according to Philip Kotler must focus on achieving a vacuum in the generation of ideas and thanks to that vacuum we will be able to take a quantitative leap and abandon the path of vertical marketing with which we have always been working. To do this, he says that we must do it on three levels:
to. At Market level
b. At Product level
c. At the Marketing Mix level
And as a tool to interrupt the logical thinking in which we have been trained, it proposes at each level to carry out 6 operations that are the essence of its formula:
1. Substitute it
2. Reverse it
3. Combine it
4. Exaggerate it
5. Eliminate it
6. Reorder it
We are going to work on this discipline through the eyes of one of the Marketing gurus, Philip Kotler, who has studied not only De Bono techniques but many others related to creativity in general, and who of course takes these approaches not as thought generic but carries out a translation and focuses only on this discipline of which he is a true expert, Marketing
In Kotler's case, what he says we need to try to provoke is a vacuum. That is going to be the keyword of his entire approach and the key that will open the doors to understanding the strategy that we are going to see, and to develop it he tells us that we must follow this sequence:
1. Choose a focus where we want to generate a lateral displacement.
2. Cause a lateral displacement to generate a vacuum.
3. Think of ways to connect that void.
Isn't it very simple? I think so, so I am going to do a brief explanation and then we start to put examples that give us light on what they mean.
1. The focus
In order to properly perform the lateral marketing scrolling, we must group the vertical marketing pieces into three levels.
A. The product
B. The market.
C. The Marketing Mix.
A. Product level is referring to "what".
B. The market level enters not only the “why”, which would be the utility or the need, but also includes the “who”, which would be the consumer, the buyer and the “when, where and to whom” that would be the uses and situations.
C. Finally, the level of marketing mix does not question any of the above but focuses on the "how" is going to be sold.
At this point, we must take into account an important aspect and without which we will not be able to advance, and that is that if we choose the market as the level where we will carry out the displacement, that inevitably forces us to work with a specific objective, however in any of the other two levels, we can carry out the movement without objectives and depending on the result we will observe what it can be used for.
2. Create a vacuum
The basis of lateral marketing is to create a vacuum. If there is no vacuum, there is no lateral marketing, we would be doing conventional marketing, that is, vertical.
The void that we are going to create with displacement is nothing other than the interruption of logical thinking, it is to get from the current product, market or marketing mix to another with which there is no connection from this current one. For example, if we scroll at the product level on the books and arrive at a series of ideas, such as a book with three-dimensional illustrations; a book with the title written on the edge of the pages, etc. We would be doing vertical marketing since no gap has been generated, because although they may be more or less interesting, they are ideas that follow logical thinking, however if the idea that has been generated says "book that is not read" Indeed that is not logical, because we need to read books to know what is in them,and there we would be doing lateral marketing.
That is the key, generating those situations that interrupt the logical connection known so far and that we do not know how to solve because a new area has been created separated from the original by a void that we do not know how to fill… for the moment.
3. Connect that void
And starting from the idea of step 2, we will try to unite that void with different options: for example, creating the audio books that we listen to instead of reading them ourselves; Or we could devise a company that sells the service of sending a person who comes to read the books, this service being aimed at people with visual disabilities; or we can reach a telephone book reading service and that way we don't have to buy them, we only need one phone call at a time; or many other alternatives that can come out of that illogical void that we had created.
To generate this vacuum, there are many techniques, and in the case of Kotler, he has grouped them into 6 operations:
A. Substitute it
B. Reverse it
C. Combine it
D. Exaggerate it
E. Eliminate it
F. Reorder it.
I have to admit that I am personally passionate about this process and that its implementation has produced very interesting results. These keys that Kotler lists us can generate surprising ideas of a very high level and of course, if we manage to bridge the gaps, very practical ideas that can help us take that leap forward and leave our competition with their mouths open.
Well, let's get started, and we'll do it in the sequence we've listed above. In order to explain it better, I am going to tell real cases that we have carried out from Fénix Media when preparing Lateral Marketing analysis for some clients that at this time have ceased to be confidential for different reasons, in some cases because the client has given me permission to do so. or because the client decided to be more conservative and not apply them, and therefore I can share them without violating any privacy. In any case, I will be discreet and will reserve the names of the clients for whom they have been designed or made.
Let's start by talking about a Business School with a long history, which is not going through its best moment. They were seeing that the number of students was less each year and that despite the fact that their courses and masters maintained an optimal level of quality and were at an average price with respect to their competition, they could not fill them.
We apply Lateral Marketing to develop new ideas that would make them take a leap and to find new approaches to develop the marketing plan for the next three years.
1. The focus
In this case we are going to see the example with the focus at the Product level.
2. Create a vacuum
a) Substitute it- Here we substitute the product itself, the master's degree, and the idea arises of not giving classes but dedicating them to playing. But play what? And something interesting comes out of that question: playing business, playing marketing. In short, we substitute the classes for a game.
b) Invest it- Here we turned the system around, and we thought about investing two things. The first is the place and we think that instead of each student attending the Business School daily, it is the teachers who go to the students' homes; and the second the price, that instead of the student paying for the course, it is the Business School that pays him for taking it. And even if you think that I have gone crazy, I assure you that none of that has happened, and there are times that we are not able to create a bridge that connects the distance that the voids have created, but other times we do and those absurd ideas are they transform into something coherent and simple. Keep reading and you will be even more surprised.
c) Combine it- At this point we decided to combine the master's degree with other products and it occurred to us that in addition to giving the classes each student was given a gift library. And when I say a library I am referring to precisely that, a good library of 50 or 60 books related to the course or master in which you have enrolled.
d) Exaggerate it- Master that lasts 5 years. Five years? Isn't that a bit of a stretch? Indeed, that is what this point is about, then we will see if this idea is useful or not.
e) Eliminate it- This was a key point since you will be thinking the same as anyone would think, that if we eliminate the product, we have nothing left, and that cannot lead to any useful place but to an absurd situation, but that is the idea precisely, so we thought about the classes, and we came up with a Master in which there are no classes. How can that happen? At this moment it does not matter, that should not worry us at this time, now we are only generating the void situations, without thinking about whether or not it is possible to unite those voids, that will be in another step later.
f) Reorder it- In this section, two reordering ideas arose, the first reordering the system: The students give classes to the teachers; and the second reordering at the degree level: give the titles at the beginning and not at the end of the master's degree.
In the meantime, of course, you already know what I always tell you, keep dreaming big that this is the main key to Success, don't settle for less.
