Make Your Brand Matter

CHAPTER 7Finding a Novel Approach to Solving a Market Need

Redefining an offering or solution is an often‐overlooked strategy for capturing brand recognition, engagement, and market share. It's long been known that people are drawn to new things. It's entertaining, it's a break from routines, and it stimulates the imagination. Neuroscience backs this up, with theories ranging from the belief that new things stimulate the fight‐or‐flight reflex to the more basic belief that modern humans are overstimulated and, therefore, easily bored. Bringing something new to the market, and to your experience, is a powerful tool, when employed properly, to increase engagement and distinguish the brand.

History is filled with examples of revolutionary thinking changing how society as a whole addressed common challenges, starting with hunter‐gatherer tools, moving to the invention of the wheel, and continuing forward through various ages of innovation and technological progress. Fortunately, we don't need to reconstruct the entire evolution of innovation across the centuries in order to explore this opportunity, as exciting a prospect as that is. We can focus instead on a few modern examples to extract key lessons that can help you rethink your brand experience strategy through the lens of innovation and novelty.

It's important to remember that novel does not mean “radical.” While there are multiple examples of radical innovation reflected in this text already, including the automobile, the ...