Cause Marketing

You’ve got a big pitch coming up, so it’s time to get the team together for a brainstorming session. Here, then, is a softball of a question: Who will come up with more innovative ideas? 1). A team of individuals. 2). The people from the team working individually. Most of us probably answered number 1. And most of us are wrong. I learned this in a March 2013 from Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in the in-flight magazine for Southwest Airlines. That's Professor Thompson on the left. “Individuals who brainstormed alone,” she writes, “generated 21 percent more ideas, and their ideas were 42 percent more original than those that generated from groups.” Although how they determined that the ideas were more original she doesn’t say. Thompson’s insights come from her new book Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules for Breakthrough Collaboration. If you think about it for a minute you can guess why this is so. Who hasn’t been in a creative meeting ...

I’m reading Steven Johnson’s fine 2010 book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation and there’s a terrific lesson therein for cause marketers looking to bring fresh thinking to their cause marketing campaigns. Johnson writes about the invention of neonatal incubators, which date from the late 1870s. On a walk through the Paris Zoo, Obstetrician Stephane Tarnier paid particular attention to the chicken incubators. Infant mortality rates, even in a sophisticated time like the Third Republic, were horrifyingly high. Tarnier wondered if an incubator for infants would help save lives. Tarnier hired the Zoo’s poultry raiser to build an incubator for infants to test his hypothesis. Knowing that his fellow Frenchmen were in thrall of Descartes and sticklers for measurement and statistics, Tarnier kept careful records. The results of the baby incubator experiment were stunning. Sans the incubator, 66 percent of low-weight babies in Tarnier's hospital died. Wit...