Copy, Copy, Copy: How to Do Smarter Marketing by Using Other People's Ideas

FOREWORD by Walter Susini, Unilever

The way to get the originality we seek . . . might be through the simple – and very human – act of copying.

In marketing today, we place a much higher price on originality and creative excellence than ever before.

We love it.

We L O V E it.

When we have it, we want more.

When we don't, we scream and scream for it.

Because we know that this is one of the few remaining ways to create competitive advantage.

Which is why you're as likely to bump into a marketing person as an art director at the ad industry's get-togethers like the Cannes Festival. They want to know what the creative people do and how.

It's also why corporations pay people like me – poacher turned gamekeeper – to help them and their partners do better work.

And why ‘derivative' or ‘unoriginal' are one of the worst things you can say in modern marketing.

But we still don't know how to get ‘original' ideas.

We don't always get the way the best new ideas and new strategies are created.

We'd like to pretend that it all happens in a deductive, predictable and repeatable way (like our manufacturing processes) but deep down, we know that it doesn't.

Equally we've long been told by those who define themselves as ‘creative people' that there's something magical about having new ideas – that new things come out in a rush, a moment of inspiration, a rush of blood or a visitation from some ...