Читать книгу Hacking Innovation - Josh Linkner - Страница 9

“Your move, BMW. The entirely new Audi A4.” These words appeared on a large billboard in Los Angeles, along with a high-quality photo of a brand new Audi A4. Clearly, the ad was rhetorical in nature. The whole point of the ad was that there’s no way BMW could possibly respond to this cool new car.

The problem for Audi: BMW is an innovative company. They are a company that knows how to leverage the strategies of hackers, how to respond to a threat with a non-traditional approach, how to adapt quickly. So within only one week, in the identical sight line of the Audi billboard, BMW fired back with their own ad. The ad featured a mean looking, jet black BMW 330i (the direct competitor to the Audi A4) with a giant one-word headline: “Checkmate.”

This is the type of agility hackers use, and the exact approach needed to win in today’s competitive business landscape. Think how the folks at Audi must have felt when their new ad completely backfired. But instead of retreating to lick their wounds, they decided to respond with a hack of their own. Two days later, on the very next billboard, Audi responded. Their ad featured a huge photo of the $145,000 Audi R8 supercar with its low profile, wide body, and gorgeous lines. The headline: “Your Pawn Is No Match For Our King.”

This launched the billboard wars of LA. Both companies began volleying back and forth, trying to outdo one another. As a result, both companies won because they both knew how to adapt fast, how to embrace an unconventional approach, and how to unleash creativity to solve a threat. The fun continued for several weeks in a constant game of one-upsmanship that included digital billboards, signs on actual cars driving the neighborhoods, and even a hot air balloon showing the BMW Indy racing car touting the headline, “Game Over. ”

During this period, competitors were shut out of the conversation. Had Lexus or Mercedes embraced the hacking mindset, they could have jumped into the fray to vie for the hearts and minds of customers. Instead, they sat silent on the sidelines.

In the end, Audi was the one taking the victory lap. The last few billboards that ran weren’t created by their ad agency, they were created by their customers. The hackers at Audi had the idea to open up the competition on social media and invite customers to submit billboard ideas to run in the LA market. Thousands of creative ideas flooded in via social media, many of which were made into giant signs including a headline saying, “Chess? I’d Rather Be Driving. ”

Imagine engaging your customers so deeply that they fight with one another to write your ads for you. To me, the best part is the fluid nature by which this came to be. There was no strategic committee that met in a windowless room with demographic data, crafting a scheme to get customers to write ads. In fact, the creativity came after an initial idea launched and backfired. There was no top-down mandate from the executive team. Instead, the savvy folks at Audi used a reversal technique often deployed by hackers to win the match.

These types of innovative maneuvers may appear to require huge budgets or the innate creativity of Mozart. Truth is, there is a systematic approach to harness this type of breakthrough thinking. The hacking model you will learn in the pages ahead will give you a toolkit to unlock the same problem-solving wizardry that’s being used to win big in the most challenging business battles.