How to Find a 4 Leaf Clover (literally and in your marketing)
Keep your fingers crossed and your nose to the grindstone.
Your chances of looking at a patch of clover and finding a four leaf clover (10,000 to 1) are better than the odds of stumbling into a great marketing campaign (unknown). If your goal is marketing success your technique shouldn’t be to just wait for good ideas to come to you. With just a little planning you can be regularly churning out the 4 leaf clovers, in your marketing but also literally.
Back to the 4 leaf clovers.
- 1 in 10,000 clovers is a 4 leaf clover.
- There are ~10k clovers in every 13 square feet
That’s just 13 1ft x 1ft squares. If you spend 2 minutes scanning each square you will on average find a 4 leaf clover every half hour. If you spend 1/2 hour each day searching for 4 leaf clovers you will have 365 4 leaf clovers after just 1 year. With practice you will get better at spotting them, know which clovers ar the right kind and find places you can go back to that tend to produce 4 leaf clovers at a much higher than normal rate.
Apply that same practice to your marketing. Take ½ hour every day learning about marketing (maybe listen to a 1 hour If You Market podcast on 2x speed) and you’re likely to have an abundance of quality marketing ideas shortly. Or don’t skip the commercials; you may be doing email or social media marketing but many of the concepts that work in print or TV commercials can work in other mediums as well.
- Know what you’re looking for
- Break down the problem
- Do the work
Turns out, just like 4 leaf clovers, if you approach marketing with intent it’s not luck at all it’s just doing the work.
What are your favorite campaign concepts, they are probably for consumer products, but that’s okay, here are some of my favorites.
- Most Interesting Man in the World
- Got Milk
- It’s a Tide ad
- The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- 1984
- Whassup
- Mac vs PC
Look at campaigns daily and ask yourself:
- What makes it work?
- Could you do something similar?
- How could you convert what works in that campaign to your product?
- Can it work in the channels you market in.
Extra musings: Four leaf clovers are lucky, but there’s one in every 13 square feet (13 unlucky), and there’s one in every 10,000 clovers and it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something, what does it all mean? Nothing, they’re just numbers, stay focused on the work, your horoscope isn’t going to make you a better marketer, unless…
Here are some articles on how to find 4 leaf clovers. (and sources)
https://people.howstuffworks.com/find-four-leaf-clover.htm
https://www.science101.com/how-to-find-a-real-four-leaf-clover/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX-f4l8wfZg
https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/how-science-can-help-you-find-four-leaf-clover-video/
https://www.wikihow.com/Find-a-Four-Leaf-Clover
By: Sky Cassidy