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.