How Reverse Thinking Can Move You Forward

The expression “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” pretty much sums up the market place for many businesses and industries these days. There are a lot of lemons being delivered right now.

Most business owners and marketing managers know you don’t gain momentum by cutting the spending on your marketing. But that knowledge often gets forgotten when revenues are down or cash flow is tight.

One of the best techniques to use for changing your perspective, and looking at your challenges differently, is reverse thinking.

When used for marketing, the technique of thinking in reverse shows you outcomes that can lead you into new ways of communicating to consumers by challenging assumptions that have become ingrained into the way you think.

When looking at the many areas of your sales and marketing, try thinking and strategizing from a different perspective.

If you want to build more traffic to your Web site, instead of sitting in meetings making statements such as “We need to get more traffic to our Web site, how do we do that?” ask yourself this question: “Why don’t we get more people visiting our Web site?”

If sales in your primary product line are in a slump, instead of trying to revive them look at which product line is selling the best. Then ask yourself “What if we focused all our marketing on the product that people are buying instead of on the product we want to sell?”

If you want more people visiting your store, instead of focusing on ways to get them into the store to buy, ask yourself “What can we do that would attract more people into our store?” The answer may not be the usual “have a sale” technique. It may be that you’ll be more successful if you focus on non-traditional reasons to bring customers into your store.

When you engage the process of reverse thinking in your planning and team meetings, you’ll make another fascinating discovery. You’ll start to see which people in your management team are stuck in traditional “we’ve always done it this way” thinking and which people have the ability to think out of the box to take new risks with new ideas.

The process will make you stronger and more creative.

To be sure you don’t get stuck back in the same old ideas, here are some of the most used “killer phrases” you’ll hear. These are guaranteed to kill innovation.

It’s not in the budget. This is the most universally accepted way to kill innovation. If you hear this phrase in response to a new idea in your strategy meetings, the answer is to change your budgets. You don’t have to increase them if that is a problem for you, but change where and how you allocate the budget to give new thinking a chance.

We don’t have the manpower to do that. Chances are that you do. Statistically, most employees while-away at least 20% of their work time not working. In tough times, this percentage actually goes up. You may find that new thinking and fresh ideas will actually get your employees excited and motivated.

It’s more trouble than it’s worth. What if you have to change or modify some internal systems or processes to try something new? Maybe those old systems need to be changed anyway. Falling back on the excuse that you can’t innovate because of the processes you have in place is a guarantee that your business will never go anywhere.

That will never work. It seems like every company has at least one naysayer in a management position. If you think for just a minute you can probably name who it is at your organization. The best way to deal with that is to ignore the person and then enjoy the opportunity to show that it can and will work.

True innovation comes from being able to think differently, the result of reverse thinking.

Corning Glass created Corelle™ dinnerware as the result of a challenge from the company CEO to do something about the fact that glass breaks.

Amazon became the biggest seller of books from creating an on-line bookstore at a time when so-called experts were claiming that books were headed toward a demise because of the Internet. Now they’re set to change reading again with the Kindle e-Reader.

Nintendo took advantage of a declining market in traditional board games to create games that could be played through the TV set, and could be played alone. Game evolution continues with Wii. Now there is even Wii Fit that brings a combination of yoga/aerobics/strength training opportunities without going to the gym.

Tide has been around for decades. But the new Tide Total Care was developed specifically by asking the question, “Clothes fade from being washed over and over. Can we stop that?” With the new Tide product, users of other detergents now have a reason to switch over and try Tide.

Steve Jobs, a co-founder of Apple, said “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity, not a threat.” It is also the ability to think differently, to reverse the standard approach to problem solving by changing the perspective of the problem.

When you start using reverse thinking and begin to think differently, remember this warning from Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, “When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you you’re nuts!”

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