As I opined 2 posts ago, a new product needs to be routed in fulfilling some preexisting need or desire in order to succeed in the marketplace. The best way to come up with ideas for new products or services is to reverse engineer your idea. By this I mean that you should first explore unmet needs or desires and then formulate a solution for it in the form of a new product or service. This is primarily what the aforementioned Eugene Schwartz did very successfully. He spent his entire career trying to understand what desires people were already predisposed to and were already unsuccessfully trying to satisfy and then created products which he claimed (wildly) satisfied those desires. He did this to the tune of six billion dollars worth of self-help products! The focus of his marketing was never on the novel product he was selling but rather on the ability to solve an age old well identified problem or desire, in a new way.


Similarly, another method of ideation is to meditate on the products or services you already provide and think if there’s some irritation or frustration within your industry that no one has yet resolved and people just put up with. That’s exactly what David Oreck from the Oreck vacuums did. He realized that the heavy weight of the average vacuum was an irritation people just lived with and he set out to alleviate that. So instead of trying to make a better vacuum cleaner, he made a lighter one. From the outset, his entire branded position centered on the fact that his vacuums only weighed 9 pounds.

Kal Vachomer marketing

On a recent trip to Home Depot, I bumped in a palette of driveway sealer. They were 5 gallon buckets piled around 5 feet high and located near the spackle. The most fascinating aspect about these buckets was their description. It was described as “airport grade”. Now that caught my attention because I don’t believe shoppers at this particular Home Depot have airports in their front or backyards. I don’t even believe that any of them own an airplane! I am also quite certain that even the local, single engine airport, if they ever needed to repair their runways, would probably not send someone to Home Depot to pick up a couple of buckets of this stuff. They’d probably hire a professional road repair contractor. Wouldn’t you think? So what’s up with the “airport grade”?

I then went to the plumbing section and a looped video caught my attention. It showed a person demonstrating how his toilets never get stuffed. The person put 15 golf balls in the toilet and then flushed. Swoosh, all 15 golf balls went straight down the toilet. Quite a feat. It got me thinking though, is there anyone in his or her right mind that plans on flushing golf balls down their toilet? So, what’s the point of showing it?

Mr. Oreck was famous for showing how the suction of his vacuum can hold a bowling ball. Question- does anyone use a vacuum to collect bowling balls?

There is a logical formula for deciding questions in the Talmud called Kal Vachomer (the “ch” in Vachomer is pronounced in the guttural German “ch”). Kal vachomer means deducing the smaller from the greater and the logic goes as follows- If something can accomplish a great feat than surely it can accomplish a smaller one as well.

While in the Talmud, this is no simple matter and is given a full treatise, for marketing purposes, it is really simple. When you show or imply that your product can do much more than anything your customer will ever need it for, they feel secure that it surely do the job they need it to do as well.

Kal Vachomer marketing gives your product so much credibility, it can be the whole basis for your brand and make it quite successful. As a matter of fact, it has made the aformentioned business quite sucessful.

How to come up with new brand ideas and new products.

If you read enough branding and marketing books, you tend to believe that the best way to brand a new business is by coming up with a brand new, totally unique concept that no one has ever thought of before. We all heard of USP’s (Unique Sales Preposition) and the word “unique” is uppermost in any professional branders mind as he goes about branding a business. Theoretically, the more thoroughly unique the idea, the better chance it has of making it as a brand name.

Though this makes for great theory and ideology, reality is very different. True, there are those that will be successful in launching a totally unique concept, but they are the exception to the rule. The best proof of this is the new invention companies that you hear advertising on the radio all the time. They promise to patent your invention and make you a multimillionaire. Sounds great, but the sad truth is that less than 1% of all inventions patented through these “invention kit” companies ever give their inventors royalties that exceed the initial outlay invested. Why is this so? Remember, the inventor was positive this new invention would make him rich. So, what happened? Why do the vast majority of new inventions fail miserably? The reality is that brand new ideas or inventions don’t sell well. Read that counterintuitive sentence again- brand new ideas don’t sell well- and therefore brand new inventions don’t take off well.

The primary reason ninety-nine point something percent of all new inventions fail is that in order for people to buy a newly invented product, they first need to need or desire that product. The question is, if life was relatively good before this product was invented, why should your customer now think they need or desire it? The obvious answer is that with rare exception, they don’t, unless you create that desire. We already described “the bar conversation” which is a powerful method of discovering true unmet needs and desires. However, creating desire where hitherto there wasn’t any, takes many years and millions of dollars of education/ marketing and even then there’s no guarantee it will take off. One of the greatest copywriters of all time- Eugene Schwartz once said “Do not try to create demand, it will tire you out”. It is difficult to condition people’s minds to need and desire a product or concept they previously never imagined.

However, there is a trick to create desire even where none previously existed and that is by associating your new idea to a preexisting one, which your customer already accepted as necessary. By correlating your new idea to one already lodged in your customers mind, he or she no longer feels the idea is frivolous and unnecessary. Since the idea already exists in his mind, just in a different form, the customer simply transfers his natural acceptance of the previous need or desire onto the product you are now offering.