Technique N°3 - Shake the words
How switching words will help you open your mind.
At eÿeka we believe that everyone is creative as soon as one opens his mind and lets ideas flow freely. To help creators from everywhere tackle brand issues, we are providing you with Creative Techniques. Browse them, play with them and add them to your daily creative process to generate your best ideas!
When you face a problem, changing words will open your mind by breaking its mental reflexes (when your brain is lazy and doesn’t want to innovate).
From this problem statement, follow the steps listed below to shake it up and generate more ideas:
- Highlight the key words in your problem statement and start noting the ideas you have.
- In your problem statement change the keywords you identified:
- Replace words with antonyms or synonyms
- Change the order of the keywords in the sentence
- Change verbs for antonyms, synonyms or just completely different words (you can connect on http://www.thesaurus.com/ to get inspired as it is a good resource to find new words)
- Note how replacing words force you to change your point of view and imagine new ideas.Let’s apply it now:
“Women” has been replaced by “men.” It could also be replaced by “dogs,” “robots” or “flowers.”
“Convince women to change their habits with an engaging and creative radio advertisement that shows what happens when Moist Toilet Tissue becomes part of their toilet routine.”
This time “illustrated story” has been replaced by “radio advertisement.” It allows you to think of the audio part of the story. In the same way the verb “shows” can be substituted by “smells” or “hides.”
“Convince women to change their habits with an engaging and creative illustrated story that shows what happens when Moist Toilet Tissue becomes part of their work routine.”
When changing the words “toilet routine” in “work routine” or “sport routine” your ideas flow more freely. You are now focusing on the place where women can use the Moist Toilet Tissue.
“Convince your toilet routine to change its habits with an engaging and creative illustrated story that shows what happens when Moist Toilet Tissue becomes part of the women.”
Some parts of the sentence can be switched: “women” becomes “toilet routine” and vice versa.
Another one can be “Moist Toilet Tissue” and “their toilet routine” (“Convince women to change their habits with an engaging and creative illustrated story that shows what happens when their toilet routine becomes part of Moist Toilet Tissue.”).
Now you can list the ideas that pop-out of your head!
Did you find new ideas to solve the problem? If yes, congrats! If not move on to the next technique!
