Marketing Stunts: Coming Up with a Brilliant Angle

Throughout marketing history, one of the most effective and unconventional ways of marketing a product is to use a marketing stunt. The cake company that made the world’s largest cake, for example, launched a successful company off the back of a single marketing campaign. History is littered with such examples.

How can you come up with an idea like that for your company? Something that will really get the attention of both media and potential customers? Here’s how.

==> Start Journaling

The moment you decide to start coming up with potential marketing ideas, you’re going to start having ideas in some very strange places.


You might think of an idea while in the car. Or while in the shower. Or while on a jog, or while eating a meal. Write all these ideas down.

Come back to these ideas later and elaborate on them.

==> Brainstorm with Other People

Don’t try to do all your brainstorming on your own. Even if you’re the head of your company, try to get other people involved, even if they’re just friends in the same industry.

Many founders struggle with the belief that they’re better off doing things on their own rather than bringing other people on board to help. This is especially common when it comes to coming up with new ideas. It’s very hard to let go of the sole responsibility to come up with good ideas.

But if your company is going to grow, it needs to happen. That’s why companies like Google encourage their employees to spend 20% of their paid work time on their own ideas. Google knows that Larry Page and Sergey Brin can’t come up with enough good ideas to sustain the company.

The lesson: get other people involved with the brainstorming process.

==> Ask Yourself: How Can I Make This Even Bigger?

Anytime you come up with an idea that sounds good, ask yourself how you can make the idea even bigger.

Let’s say you’re promoting a marketing product and you decide to host a contest where you give away two all-expenses paid trips to a marketing conference.

Instead of just hosting the contest and publishing it on your website, ask yourself: how can I make this even bigger?

You might partner with the marketing conference to open the conference up to all participants. You might do an ad buying campaign to let everyone in the industry know about the contest. These two ideas could take your idea from a 500-person exposure project to a 10,000-people exposure project.

Always ask yourself: how can I make this even bigger?

If you follow these three tips – writing down all your ideas, brainstorming with other people and asking yourself how you can make things even bigger – you’ll quickly develop some winning high-impact campaigns.