The ad copy put it this way: “New Sea Dogs are the ultimate in healthy hotdog-shaped products. They’re made from fresh fish blended with low-fat tartar sauce for an absolutely delicious, absolutely different, absolutely healthy hotdog-shaped taste sensation.”
New and different, all the way. Sea Dogs contained no rat hairs or beef lips. But while the idea may have been good for a grin, it was bad on a bun. My dogs were revolting to consumers; the idea of a hot dog skin stuffed with fish held little public appeal.
The lesson I learned here was less costly than the one I learned from Stinky. This time, consumers tested the concept. And while Sea Dogs were being tested on the client’s behalf, 24 other ideas were also being run past consumers. Of those, five ideas were identified as having serious market potential. The Sea Dog wasn’t one of them.
WHAT SEPARATES NEW AND DIFFERENT GOOD FROM NEW AND DIFFERENT BAD?
So what went wrong with Stinky the Pig? What made the Sea Dog dead meat? Didn’t both qualify as new and different? Didn’t they satisfy the Eureka! rule calling for great ideas to contradict history?
Indeed, they did. Both ideas stretched boundaries of one sort or another. But the factors that made them stand out weren’t meaningful to consumers. A wicked good idea needs to be meaningfully new and different!
“Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.”
– Ben Franklin
But how can you tell the difference? I continue to this day to search for an easy way. The best answer I have so far is the Merwyn Research system (named in honor of my dad—Merwyn Bradford Hall).
Merwyn is an idea-evaluation system created by the Eureka! Ranch team that evaluates how obvious and self-evident your idea is to potential customers. It accomplishes this by benchmarking the idea against some 50 success factors that were identified from an analysis of 4,000 ideas. The success factors were identified by reverse engineering what separated ideas that were successful in the marketplace from those that weren’t.
Merwyn is a tough, disciplined tool. It doesn’t take into account assumptions, implied understandings, or previous experiences in its assessment of the idea you’re trying to sell.
The 50 success factors cluster into three overall “laws” that I’ve branded as the Three Laws of Marketing Physics. These are the three most important factors when evaluating the potential for success of your new idea.
Law No. 1: OVERT Benefit
Or as customers might put it, “What’s in it for me?”
A benefit is what you promise that customers will receive, experience and enjoy in exchange for their commitment to your proposal, product or service. The customer in this case can be your boss when asking for a raise. It can be the father of your sweetheart you’re seeking to marry.
Law No. 2: REAL Reason to Believe
Or as customers might put it, “Why should I believe you?”
What evidence is there to convince customers that the overt benefit you’re promising will actually be delivered?
Law No. 3: DRAMATIC Difference
Or as customers might put it, “Why should I care?”
Is the combination of benefit and reason to believe something the customer cannot realize in any other way?
Each of these laws has a huge impact on success. Research indicates that all other factors being equal:
• Having a clear Overt Benefit triples your odds of success.
• Having a real Reason to Believe doubles your odds of success.
• Having a Dramatic Difference triples your odds of success.
Note: For an in-depth discussion of theses three laws—how to identify them, how to articulate them, and how to create them—read Jump Start Your Business Brain.
MERWYN IS TOUGH—VERY TOUGH—BECAUSE IT’S A TOUGH WORLD.
Because most ideas fail in the real world, most ideas fail in Merwyn as well.
Your life passes before your eyes as you wait for the scores of your precious newborns to arrive in your e-mail in box. It hurts to see many of your babies bite the dust. But that’s how fragile newborns are. They can be eliminated with the press of a button. Still, it’s a form of mercy killing. And it beats spending thousands, even millions of dollars preparing your product for test marketing, shooting advertising, designing packaging.
Merwyn itself is a wicked good idea. Tracking studies show it has one of the most accurate prediction records of any market research system ever tested. It’s been shown to have an 88 percent accuracy predicting probability of success in the marketplace. It’s been validated in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. It’s been validated for written concepts, television commercials, radio commercials, direct mail advertisements, and e-mail campaigns.
Merwyn has increased our Eureka! Ranch success ratio considerably. But how do you evaluate ideas if you don’t have Merwyn? And what if you have an idea that’s not necessarily something to sell? The simple concept to keep in mind is WOW!
Wicked GREAT Ideas Make You Say WOW!
As a natural consequence of creating and testing thousands of ideas a year, I’m always learning about ideas—good, bad, and otherwise. The process, I hope, will continue as long as I live.
In my experience, I find that the most wicked, pure gold great, ideas satisfy a one-word criterion. They make you shout …
Wicked good ideas make you catch your breath. A wicked good idea generates uncontrollable buzz, down the hall, around the corner, in the elevator, and throughout the building. The minute you tell it to someone, they shout WOW! And they tell it to someone else, who shouts WOW! It generates interest in the news media and the lunchroom. This doesn’t do much for corporate security, but it’s exciting.
There is no ONE way to WOW! In any given area of products, any given line, the number of WOW! opportunities is limitless.
You get WOW! when you bring together all elements of an idea to create a synergistic impact. It’s like selecting individual notes to make a chord. The harmony is richer, more beautiful than any of the single notes alone. The harmony makes you gasp. It stirs you emotionally and rationally.
Ideas that generate a WOW! use beauty, simplicity, and elegance to appeal to the emotions.
Ideas that generate a WOW! offer logical, tangible superiority.
Just as the 12 notes of the chromatic scale can be arranged into an infinite number of melodies or the 26 letters of the alphabet can be combined to form an infinite number of books, so is there no limit to the WOWS! that can be extracted from any creative problem you may face.
The key is to stake your claim—define your area of excellence, then muster all your efforts into delivering that singular point of excellence.
WOW! ideas are the best at whatever it is they are. They identify a particular area of expertise and establish their entry as the ultimate in its class.
I SPELL WOW! LIKE THIS:
Wicked easy to understand
Original
Whole Solution
! Be magic
WICKED EASY TO UNDERSTAND
Before we go anywhere with evaluating the idea—we need to understand what the idea is. Here are the facts…
FACT: Eureka! Research on 4,000 innovations