Pure Genius: How to Make the Un-newsworthy Newsworthy

3 min reading time

Let’s face it, medical devices aren’t known for their clever marketing campaigns.

Which is why I’m compelled to share this most clever marketing strategy with hopes it sparks an idea in you.

Behold Diamond Shreddies.

In a world of fruit and nut clustered cereals, Shreddies is kind of boring. Just a wholesome wheat square, really.

Until a genius in their marketing department turned the cereal on its side and made it newsworthy. See:

They created an entire campaign around it. It was hilarious and, if you couldn’t decide between your traditional “square” Shreddies and new “diamond” Shreddies, you could opt for the Shreddies combo pack.

Think expansively.

What could you do to breathe life into your workhorse products, the medical devices you’ve been selling year-in and year-out?

Share of Hearts and Minds

If you were to launch a campaign around your tired devices – those with no meaningful innovation in the past decade – you can reignite interest among your sales people and distributors.

Ed Kennedy, then Vice President of Distribution (Americas) for Cardiac Science, once told me, “In addition to the revenue it drives, it builds such passion, such commitment and belief from your people that they’ll perform at a higher level than they would have with just traditional marketing.”

So today’s inspiration: Turn your ECG device on its side. Breathe some life into your tired medical devices and re-energize your team.

It’s inexpensive, and worth the effort.

My screensaver this week

If you loved this show, write me back. In seventh grade, Thursday night at 9:30 p.m. was the beginning of my week.

We can’t? Who says?

I had back-to-back conversations yesterday with groups telling me “no.” The first was a business partner. The second was charitable organization for whom I volunteer.

Without getting into details, both had variations on “that’s not the way we do it.”

Each easily defended the status quo: There were plenty of reasons to reject my suggestions.

The charity hosted someone from “the Seattle office.” I introduced myself, “My name is Joe and I’m an instigator. I say this with respect, ‘I don’t care what the rules are. We want to help the impoverished in our community. Why wouldn’t we use contemporary marketing strategies to achieve our goals?'”

I added the necessary “within the law or whatever the parish will let us do” but the point brought me back to my days at Kraft Foods.

I can’t remember now if I heard this in cereal, bagels, Jell-O, or Kool-Aid but I remember the phrasing quite well:

What would I have to believe in order to …

It was a construct intended to remove all reasons why not.

For a medical device example, if you did $10 million in sales this year, what would you need to believe in order to sell $14 million this year?

You may not get twice the budget, twice the headcount, changes in regulations, etc., but if you could, what would you do differently?

Then work backwards. What parts could you do?

So, my TL;DR for today: (1) Approach your project completely differently and (2) Suspend disbelief long enough to brainstorm.

Please.

Fast Round

Be My Eyes. I tried to explain this concept to my mother for her blind friend. The 01:36 video makes it crystal clear.

Mind expanding time: Is there a germ of an idea here you could use in your business?

Phone or LinkedIn URL? In The Journey four weeks ago, I wrote “How to Generate More Leads from Webinars.” I included this one survey question:

You are running a lead generation program. You can collect a name, and email address and EITHER a phone number or a LinkedIn Profile URL. Which would you choose?

A statistically significant number of you answered, thank you. Here are the results.