Allen Adamson

The challenge? For retail brands, holiday performance can make or break their entire year. Target faced this reality head-on after a particularly tough year of declining sales and mounting pressure to win back customers. They needed a bottom-of-the-ninth home run during the critical Christmas shopping season. And they delivered by breaking three unwritten rules of holiday marketing.

In my latest book, "Seeing the How: Transforming What People Do," Not Buy to Gain Market Advantage, I emphasize the importance of looking through different lenses to identify marketplace opportunities. One of these lenses is titled "Go the Rental Route," and a simple way to activate that lens and see the marketplace with fresh eyes is to go down to your basement (or storage locker if you don't have one) and take a look around.

From one industry to the next, there’s no question that business success relies on innovation. Innovation grows a business, and helps it stay ahead of the competition. While many marketers begin their quest for innovation by asking “what,” more and more of today’s highly successful businesses are the result of those asking “how?” Their objective is to identify ways to change up how consumers do things – the stuff of daily life – to make these activities easier, more convenient, or better.

The need for certainty is a gravitational pull shared by all marketers. From project to project, our clients ask us (and we ask each other), “Are you sure this is going to work? Is it going to sell the product?” This would seem both natural, and rational. Selling the product is what we do for a living. It’s what makes our world go ‘round.