How to Generate Breakthrough Ideas with Storytelling for Innovation

How do we get back to the breakthrough mindset in the world? We live in a time where getting attention has become more important than being relevant or meaningful. And we spend a bazillion dollars a just to get to that point, often with the tiniest margins in return. So today we look at how we can return to an abundant, breakthrough-focused mindset. So your story will stick.

“You have to break through the clutter”

Michel Roux

Not all that glitters is gold... (image credit Absolut Vodka)

Legend Has It…

… that when the Swedish state-owned Vin & Spirit distillery want to introduce their Swedish Absolut Vodka brand to the US market all these decades ago, they had asked two of the biggest and most important research companies in America to tell them how consumers would respond to a new vodka brand.

The advice was it could not be done.

According to these research giants, in the minds of the American consumer there was a paradigm that could never be challenged: vodka came from Russia, and from Russia alone. Smirnoff was the brand. No other brand could ever be introduced. There was no way. The associations with the vodka category and the motherland were simply that strong. The advice was not to risk it.

Worse still, in the trendy clubs and restaurants, vodka would only, exclusively, ever be used in the Cosmopolitan cocktail. So, there wasn’t a big market to begin with. In short, the message from these market research 'experts'? Don’t do it. Don't challenge the status quo.

Michel Roux however, the soon-to-be-famous French spirits importer and distributor that had moved to New York to make it big, wasn’t so sure. He decided to do a little research by himself. Nothing empirical or data-oriented mind you. He just decided to have a blast and spend a few weeks in New York’s hustling and bustling night life. What he discovered was a thriving artistic community, full of art, music, innovation and fashion. And the coolest spot, where the best creative minds converged, was a tiny little club called Studio 54.   

It led to an idea: ‘What if I introduce this new vodka brand with a fashion show in Studio 54?’. And so he did. Before long there were weekly Absolut-branded fashion shows going on, where artists would show off their clothing creations. It was for the coolest kids on the block, with the best, most outrageous designs they could create. And of course, Roux made sure that Absolut vodka was the spirit that was served during the shows, sparking lots of new cocktail ideas for good measure. And to top it all off, the best designed outfit would win a golden Absolut bottle.

It quickly became a hit. And someone else started to tag along, a rising fine artist called Andy Warhol, not in the least because he was fascinated by the shape of the Absolut Vodka bottle. You see, the shape of that bottle is of a Swedish medicine bottle. Medicine that of course, had to be 100% pure to be effective. The name itself ‘Absolute’ is derived from that pureness concept.

An Absolute, 100% Pure, Medicine-like Vodka. Served in a medicine bottle. What more could you give to the trendy people in New York?

The vodka brand exploded. Before long, the rising artist that was Warhol was making countless of artistic designs around the bottle’s shape. Paintings that were later used in gigantic ads across city, country and world, finding their ways into galleries across all continents. And to this day, Absolut uses the structure of Warhol his ad design.

That is how legend has it.

Sometime later, when the press started to notice this meteoric rise of a new vodka brand, and all the art and fashion coming with it, in an interview with a NY newspaper, a journalist asked Michel Roux how he did it. He replied, with a heavy french accent... “Sometimes, you just have to break through the clutter”, with an emphasis on cluttère...

Where the Story of Business Went Wrong

Flash forward to today and we live in 'The Age of Distrust' (Edelman) and 'The Age of Cynicism' (Havas Media) in which trust numbers in all large institutions - business, politics, media, NGO and education - are usually below 20%. A time when 4 out of 5 of the 2000-or-so worldwide biggest brands could disappear tomorrow without being missed. On top of that we are seeing the rampart fraud, especially in the US, that is so typical just before markets crash, or even uprisings and revolutions. All in a time of rising temperatures, complexity and disillusionment with leadership.

Why? How did we get here? The short answer is basically this: we've abandoned the abundance mindset.

The longer story is that of hubris. For a moment there, we had reached a moment with lots of art, innovation and progress in a time with relatively few conflicts and a general sense that humankind was becoming more united. And indeed, we did get to that point, and it was something to be celebrated. Then came the overconfidence.

We believed for a while we had reached the 'end of history' as Fukuyama put it. We thought we had divined a system of absolute freedom, including absolute freedom for markets and economies, that could not fail because it would always balance itself out. All our other institutions, such as government, science, media and even NGO's, gave into this Neo-liberal belief as a result. But the results weren't as absolute as we'd hoped.

To quote the video-game Darkest Dungeon: "Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer." Slowly, the great abundance mindset that had given us such forward momentum made way for ever higher demands and an entitled consumer mindset. We now know the stresses of our 24/7 economy, filled with artificial fillers, flavors and intelligence. It doesn't feel real and connected anymore, while the world that is real, is in dire straits. And so we've become anxious and fearful, unable to fulfill our mental and emotional needs, clasping, clinging and kludging to whatever short-term gains we can scramble.

In other words, a scarcity mindset.

The Bad Changes that Precede Good Change

Gone was this idea of being 'the misfit, the rebel, the trouble-maker' - so eloquently presented in that famous, groundbreaking commercial Here's to the Crazy Ones - that had made an obscure computer brand called Apple connect with a burgeoning creative class, looking for breakthroughs.

Back then, embracing its empathy and creativity, this thinking made Apple into the biggest business on the planet. Yet by and large, in business right now, we no longer believe that breaking dogma's and paradigms is the best way to go. These days, the 'old-guard' businesses seem to think it's more advantageous to bribe and manipulate than to actually go out there, connect to the crowd, and innovate based on your findings. And the new businesses have an attitude of just throwing endless streams of money at a problem, and are often even more disconnected to the audience as the old ones, thinking their tech-tools will save them. In essence, they 'buy' marketshare, instead of earning it.

None of these brands are trusted. And that's a problem with and incredible cost, a brand is nothing more than a network of associations in our minds. If I ask you which brand has the color red, there’s a pretty big chance you’d immediately say Ferrari. Toys + Denmark leads to Lego. Great brands have such big, trusted and simple associations, we recognize them immediately. Yet nowadays, many brands are still recognized... for all the wrong things.

You see, this concept is also applicable to negative associations. No matter the brand, the entire sector of banking is deeply mistrusted for instance. And so is tech. In fact, across all institutions we see far more distrust than trust. And it is largely because of a failure to connect emotionally. Plus, I'd argue, a failure in the 'cojones' region.

If we agaig take Apple as the poster child of tech, those proverbial balls were not much of a problem in the old days. The company was founded by the two Steve's, Wozniak and Jobs, who both acted as visionary paradigm breakers, just like Michel Roux did. In these times however, we have to make due with CEO's that are either bullies, suck-ups, bribers or even featured suspiciously in the Epstein files.

Of course I'm making a moral point. But more importantly, I'm making a business point: a scarcity mindset is contrary to entrepreneurship and has huge hidden costs the size of dark matter. In other words, it's just bad for business. Hence our constant reliance on ever more complicated artificial intelligence tools that gives us just that 'one-click-more' endorphin, while we stare at our performance marketing dashboard... Okay, you get the gist. Who do we solve this?

The question thus becomes; how do you break through the clutter?

Be Emotionally Intelligent         

Remember, brands are shortcuts to the mind. And when you face a challenge with the associations that act as those shortcuts, the solution is simple: you challenge the challenge, by being the most emotionally intelligent. This is in the end what Apple did. Sure, everyone was building computers. But they were building emotionally appealing ones. Colorful instead of grey. Easy to use instead of complex. Tools for art, film, music and design, instead of spreadsheets.

When a brand is recognizable and unique, especially emotionally, it acts as an anchor that is easily remembered and shared. As such, brands can win with functional associations, but only when they have a superior inventiveness than other brands. All brands are after all a mix between function and emotion. Even the medicine bottle shape of Absolut Vodka actually started out as a functional choice: they just had tons of those medicine bottles leftover. What to do?

The best vision on branding is therefore to build balance between the brands functions and its emotions. And to add weight to either the functional or emotional side, when this is required. "For a brand to be successful, it needs to engage the mind as well as the heart." If I may quote my dad Roland.

Yet understand this: in the end, all successful companies, brands and products are emotionally intelligent. They win on that part, more than on the functional side. They have a soul, a strong sense of identity which originates from a belief system, mentality or insight that makes it unique. The brand needs to do what it promises to do and excel within its category. Yet it also needs to connect emotionally to be remembered quickly, especially in the busy brand spaces of today.

A unique, appealing identity helps the outside world make the choice for your brand... and today that is easier than ever. Because in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And today, so... so many brands are blind.

Breaking the Paradigm... By Breaking the Culture

That heart can be reached in multiple ways. But the best start is this: write down all the current paradigms and dogmas in your category. And then ask with each and every one of them: can I break it?

Another spirits brand called Aviation Gin, the gin brand by actor Ryan Reynolds, is a good example of Michel Roux his spirit reverberating in modern times. Reynolds broke the paradigm of 'seriousness' that is associated with the liquor and spirits category, and replace it with something culturally more relevant and up to date.

The spirit category always feels like it has to hold back on the 'party' feeling, lest they are haunted by those institutions pointing to the negative sides of alcohol. The dogma in this category has therefore become 'indulgence yourself with one or two glasses'. Brands do still show enjoyment, but they are usually desperately trying to avoid the image of boozing and getting shit-faced drunk. And so, they almost all choose to go the traditional 'artisan' image route.

Reynolds grabbed that category feeling, and then made fun of it. He needed only a few of these paradigm breaking videos to go viral, connecting to a new, more contemporary tone of voice. None of that strategy is about tech, or trying to buy attention and clicks. He didn't need to. All of it is about being culturally relevant, being there were the heart of your audience resides (YouTube) and understand how they want to feel.

Another superb example is the campaign for the Hema homeware brand in The Netherlands who wanted to connect to a younger audience. What they did was stop doing traditional ads for a while and make Tik-Tok video's that really were Tik-Tok video's: music and dance was used to show off the goods. The effect was absolutely hilarious - people dancing and rapping in the home goods store with music blasting and lights flashing... This has grown into an entire channel full of other content with over 300K followers, which is huge for such a small country. And all it takes is a fun attitude and one mobile phone. Paradigm broken.

There are even bigger paradigms you can break. Patagonia for instance, made the 'Don't buy this jacket' campaign as a statement to over-consumption. You had to actually fill in a very long pledge, with dozens of subjects, solemnly swearing you would live a healthier, greener life with less impact on the environment... before you could even buy the jacket.

It broke multiple paradigms at once. Including a very 'insidious killer' of this day and age: an over-reliance on efficiency.

Screw Efficiency, Be Effective

During the beginning stages of the war, Ukraine was in desperate need of money to buy hospital supplies for all the wounded soldiers and civilians. One of the companies they reached with their pleas was Havas Media and their 'Play' division, specialized in making media-first creative ideas within cultural groups.

They came up with a groundbreaking idea: build a map of Kiev's freedom square in one of the world's biggest games - in the 'shooter' genre no less - and invite players to come have a look and play on that map. Through the micro-transaction system already in the game, cash could be gathered for the hospitals. The total effort (and cost) of it all was a small team of map makers and a badly written press statement. If the costs exceeded 10K or so, I'd be surprised.

It reached 1.3 billion views worldwide. And although they don't share numbers, we suspect at least tens of millions, possibly into the 'hundred' digit as well.

The key wasn't calculating costs, or media buying, or performance marketing click 'buys'. It was understanding on an emotional level what these shooting games are: catharsis for people who 'shoot' in a virtual world... because they despise war in the real world. Understanding this about gaming culture, plus having a sense of the gaming mechanisms in this cultural space, was enough to propel it all into the stratosphere.

Because Reddit did the rest. The gamers just spread it. At no costs. By the millions.

So, pardon my french here but... screw efficiency. Because efficient this was not. But it sure as hell was effective.

Embrace the Unknown

Just because you’re seen doesn’t mean you’re talented. Just because you get attention doesn't mean you're successful. Just because you participate in a data-driven rat race doesn't mean you're the fastest rat.

In fact, it probably means the opposite: apparently you are willing to stress yourself out for the tiniest margins. In other words, you are stuck in a scarcity mindset.

However much money they hoard, it is a fact that our tech-leaders of today, and the brands they represent, are caught in an extreme scarcity mindset, as their low trust numbers prove. On paper they may have wealth flowing, but it comes at a cost that once you know it, you can easily circumvent by even being just a little bit more empathetic than they are.

So, if you want to become a breakthrough thinker, that's the paradigm you should start with: break with the current tech-on-a-pedestal trend. Choosing humanity, empathy and creativity has always been the most successful strategy. Especially when the rest are stuck in a functional loop.

Or let me put it in another way: despite what they may like you to think, the tech-bro's of today aren't the paradigm breakers of business like the old ones were. They are its slaves, following a thought pattern that leads to ever smaller connections and margins, with ever higher societal and business costs. They are the status quo that we need to break with.

Ask yourself how often you think 'that's just how things are now' or 'you have to be realistic'. Do you use this as an excuse to avoid putting the effort of making a real connection? That's how you challenge today's status quo: you are already groundbreaking if you make a simple human connection. So especially right now, choosing this storytelling route will put you in front instead of lagging behind.

That's how you break through today's cluttère.

And oh yes, lest we forget, that's also the most fun route. Because Steve Jobs was right about one other thing he mentions, paraphrasing his famous speech: "It's more fun to be a pirate, than to join the navy." I just listened to his speech again. It's just brilliant.

I'll drink to that. So, here's to you, Michel. Rest in peace. Hopefully with a nice big, cold glass of pure Absolut in your hands.

And I miss you too, Steve. I think right now, we all do.

Love, as always,

Rogier van Kralingen

And check out my book The Whole Story - The Ultimate Guide to Storytelling!