The Best Idea in the World Is Worthless If Nobody Wants It

The symptoms tend to be remarkably similar. You have an idea. You love the idea. Your family thinks it sounds exciting. A few friends tell you it is genius. A PowerPoint is created. A logo appears. Someone starts discussing colour palettes. And suddenly, six months have been spent building something without anyone having asked whether customers actually want it.

Then comes the launch. And the market responds with a resounding: Right.

This is where Lorraine Hudson Marchand’s book "The Innovation Mindset" becomes interesting. It presents eight laws of innovation. Some of them sound almost provocatively obvious: solve the right problem, listen to your customers, have a plan, manage the risks and pitch well. You could argue that none of this is exactly revolutionary. No. And yet it is surprising how many companies fail to do it.

That is also why the book caught my attention. Because although it is about innovation, much of it is really about the same things we work with every day at BBMB: understanding what you are actually selling, to whom, why anyone should care and how to build a brand that people both understand and want.

Innovation and branding are much more closely connected than many people think. A new product without a clear position is simply a new product. A company without a clear story is simply a registration number. And an entrepreneur who wants to become the public face of a company but cannot explain what she stands for has a problem, regardless of how many Instagram followers she has.

Don’t Start With the Solution

The first rule in the book is the most important: solve the right problem. It sounds about as exciting as reading the instructions on a fire extinguisher. But think about it. How many companies actually start there?

Entrepreneurs are often in love with solutions. That is quite natural. It is much more fun to talk about the app, the product, the collection, the service or the new platform than the rather unglamorous problem that all of it is supposed to solve. But customers do not buy your innovation because you think it is innovative. They buy it because it makes something better, easier, more attractive, faster, safer or more desirable.

It is exactly the same when we work with brands. We sometimes get questions that, in practice, begin at the wrong end. What colours should we use? Does the CEO need to be more visible on LinkedIn? Should we arrange a major launch event? How do we get more press?

All of those questions can be relevant. But not first. First, we need to understand which problem we are trying to solve.

If a fashion company is struggling to move from being a fairly broad commercial brand into the premium segment, simply changing the typeface and shooting the campaign in an Italian palazzo will not help very much. It may look very beautiful. It may also become very expensive. And still be wrong.

Premium positioning begins with understanding why the customer should pay more. What is there in the product, the story, the distribution, the design, the service and the experience that justifies it?

The same applies to people. An entrepreneur might say: I need more PR. My response is often: Why? Do you want to attract investors? Recruit better people? Sell more products? Become a thought leader? Open doors to international markets? Those are five entirely different assignments. Simply wanting to “be more visible” is rarely a strategy. It is a wish.

Three Ideas Are Better Than the First One

The next principle in the book is about exploring several solutions before deciding which one to pursue. This should be obvious. But people are rather fond of their first idea. Especially when they came up with it themselves.

The book recommends forcing yourself to develop several alternatives, visualising them and avoiding judging ideas too early. It is a method I really like. Very often, the first idea comes from what you already know. The third, fourth or tenth idea, however, may actually start to become interesting.

When we work with a brand, it is rare for someone to walk into the room with the perfect positioning neatly written down on a piece of paper. We turn it around. We test different stories. We look at the competitors. We look at the target audience. We look at what the company wants to be in five years, not only what it happens to be today.

This becomes particularly important for companies that have grown quickly. Startups often face a strange problem once they become successful: the outside world continues to see them as the company they were three years ago. The business may have become larger, the product better and the customers more international. The brand has not kept up.

At that point, you sometimes need to do something much more difficult than starting from scratch. You need to change people’s perception of something they already believe they know. That is repositioning. And you do not achieve it by choosing the first idea that comes up in a Monday meeting.

Start Smaller Than Your Ego Would Like

The third law is about the MVP, the Minimum Viable Product. In other words: build the simplest version that can actually be tested.

The book uses Zappos as an example. The founder wanted to find out whether people would buy shoes online at all. Instead of starting with enormous warehouses, logistics systems and investments, he built a simple website. When someone placed an order, he went to a physical store, bought the shoes and sent them to the customer.

Not particularly scalable. But extremely smart. He tested the question that mattered: Do people want to buy shoes online?

More companies should apply this way of thinking to branding as well. Everything does not have to begin with a three-million-krona campaign. You can test a message, an event format, a new target audience, a content strategy, a visual direction or a founder’s new positioning. Then you look at what happens.

The problem is that this sometimes clashes with the entrepreneur’s ego. You have waited a long time for your big launch. You want to make an entrance. Preferably with champagne, photographers and a guest list that makes half of Stockholm wonder why they were not invited.

There are certainly occasions when that is exactly the right thing to do. BBMB works with exclusive events, launches and brand experiences. But an event is never good simply because it is expensive. A successful event has to do a job for the brand. The right people should attend. The right people should talk about it. The right images should spread. And guests should understand the brand better when they leave than they did when they arrived.

Otherwise, you have simply organised a very expensive party. There are quite enough of those already.

Talk to Your Customers. Really.

The fourth law is about customer understanding. The author goes quite far and recommends speaking to at least one hundred potential customers before launching a new product or service.

One hundred.

This is probably where some entrepreneurs start shifting uneasily in their chairs. Because it is much easier to sit in a conference room and talk about the target audience than it is to actually talk to the target audience. It is also more comfortable. Customers have the unfortunate habit of occasionally having the wrong opinion.

They may dislike what you love. They may be completely uninterested in the feature your development team spent six months working on. They may think the price is wrong. They may misunderstand the entire offer. Which is, of course, annoying. But extremely valuable.

We work a great deal with precisely this part when developing brands. Who are you actually trying to reach? What does that person want? What is your brand signalling today? And, most importantly: is that the same thing you think you are signalling?

Very often, it is not. A company may think it feels exclusive. The customer may think it feels expensive. Those are not the same thing. A founder may believe she comes across as visionary. The outside world may perceive her as unfocused. Not the same thing either.

That is why we do not only look at what a client says they want to be. We look at how they are actually perceived. LinkedIn. Interviews. Press photography. Website. Messaging. Clothes. Stage appearances. Events. The contexts in which the person appears. The people the brand is associated with.

Everything communicates. Even the things you did not intend to communicate. Especially those, actually.

Changing Direction Is Not the Same as Failing

The fifth law says entrepreneurs have to be prepared to pivot. The startup world has managed to make that word almost unbearable. But the idea itself is sound.

If the market changes, the company has to be able to change. That does not mean throwing the entire strategy in the bin every time a competitor does something new on TikTok. Quite the opposite. A good pivot keeps the direction but changes the route.

This is also an important distinction in branding. Brands need to evolve. But they should not panic. Those are two entirely different things.

A strong brand knows which parts form its core and which parts can change. This is particularly important for premium brands. They cannot chase every new trend without eventually losing what made them attractive in the first place. At the same time, they cannot stand still and hope the world will adapt to them.

The balance is difficult. That is why strategy is necessary.

We work with many companies that find themselves in exactly that position. They have reached a certain level. Now they want to move on. Internationally. More exclusively. Towards new audiences. Towards investors. Towards a higher price point.

Sometimes that means changing quite a lot without making it look as though everything has changed. That is a considerably greater skill than simply carrying out a rebrand and publishing a press release.

Have a Plan. Yes, Really.

The sixth law is almost provocatively old-fashioned. Have a business plan.

At a time when we adore words such as disruption, agility and entrepreneurship, the word “plan” sounds about as fashionable as a fax machine. But I agree.

Having a plan does not mean knowing exactly what will happen three years from now. Nobody does. It means knowing what you are trying to achieve, who the customer is, how the company will make money, what the risks are, which resources are needed and how you intend to get from point A to point B.

Exactly the same principle applies to brands. I am continually surprised by how many companies have a detailed sales budget but no clear brand strategy. They know exactly what they want their revenue to be in 2028. But they do not know what they want to be known for.

It is a little like knowing the exact address of your destination while refusing to look at a map.

At BBMB, we therefore work strategically before we work tactically. What is the position? Which target audiences are the priority? What is the story? How should the founder be visible? Which media matter? Which events strengthen the brand? Which collaborations elevate it, and which risk weakening it? How should it sound? How should it look?

Then we can start producing. It is less glamorous than a major campaign. But considerably more useful.

Risk Is Also About Reputation

The seventh law is about risk. Financial risk. Strategic risk. Operational risk. Market risk. And reputational risk.

More entrepreneurs should write the last one in capital letters. Because it takes years to build a strong brand and sometimes about half an afternoon to damage one.

That applies to companies. It applies to founders. It applies to leaders. And the more visible a person becomes, the less there is that is truly private in the sense of being irrelevant to the brand.

I have worked with personal brands for many years, and one thing comes up again and again: people underestimate the details. What you say. How you say it. Which situations you say yes to. Which collaborations you enter into. How you behave when someone is filming. How you look on stage. What you write when you are irritated at 11.47 p.m.

All of it can become part of the picture people have of you.

That does not mean people should walk around like media-trained robots. Quite the opposite. Authenticity matters. But authenticity is not the same thing as having no strategy.

A truly strong public persona feels spontaneous while still having a very clear core. That is not a contradiction. It is a skill.

For our entrepreneur clients, a personal brand can also be a direct business asset. It can open doors to investors, media, international collaborations, conferences and talent. For a fashion entrepreneur, the same work can help both the founder and the company move towards a clearer premium position.

At that point, reputational risk is no longer some minor PR issue on the side. It becomes business strategy.

And Then You Have to Be Able to Sell the Whole Thing

The final law in the book is about the pitch. It does not help to have a fantastic idea if you cannot make other people understand why it is fantastic.

An entrepreneur must be able to explain the problem, the solution, the market, the business model, the potential, the team and why anyone else should want to be part of it.

The same applies to a brand. You often have very few seconds to establish a position in another person’s mind. What is this? Why is it interesting? Why is it different? Why should I care?

That is storytelling in its most concrete form.

And this is where I often see the same mistake. Companies talk about themselves when they should be talking about why they matter. They tell us when they were founded. How passionate they are. That they offer high quality. That the customer is at the centre of everything they do.

Which is, of course, lovely. It is also what approximately every other company says.

Good storytelling is not about writing more words. It is about finding the right words.

For an exclusive design brand, for example, it may mean building a story around craftsmanship, materials, provenance, limited availability and cultural relevance rather than relying on traditional product marketing. That is precisely the kind of strategic positioning BBMB works with for premium brands that want to grow internationally without losing their exclusivity.

It is an important distinction. Luxury is rarely sold by shouting the loudest. Quite often, the opposite is true.

There Are No Shortcuts. Unfortunately.

By the time I reached the end of the summary of *The Innovation Mindset*, I thought the book’s eight laws could really be reduced to one idea: do the work before demanding the result.

Understand the problem. Understand the customer. Test. Listen. Change. Plan. Protect what you are building. And learn how to explain why anyone should care.

That is more or less what we tell our clients as well. There are no quick fixes in brand building.

You can buy attention. You can buy advertising. You can buy a major event. You can even buy followers, although I really would not recommend it. But you cannot buy a clear position overnight. You cannot buy credibility on Tuesday and have it delivered by Friday. And you certainly cannot order a premium brand together with a new set of business cards.

It is built. Decision by decision. Image by image. Interview by interview. Product by product. Customer experience by customer experience.

And that is actually rather liberating. Because it also means small companies can beat larger ones. A startup with a limited budget but a razor-sharp understanding of its target audience can build a stronger brand than a much larger competitor spending millions on communication without knowing what it wants to say.

An entrepreneur with a few thousand relevant followers can have more influence than a far more famous person with no clear position. A small design brand can feel more exclusive than a global corporation.

Size is not the same thing as strength. Visibility is not the same thing as relevance. And innovation is not the same thing as having a good idea.

Things only really start to happen when the idea meets a genuine need, a clear position and people who understand why it matters.

The rest is, to put it a little less grandly, mostly a very expensive PowerPoint.