Brainstorming in silence. You should try it with your marketing colleagues. Instead of shouting your ideas, you write a few ideas down on paper and pass it on to your colleagues for their inspiration.
The traditional way of brainstorming is not everyone's cup of tea. Brainstorming is mostly interesting for people who like to share their ideas in a group. But, let's think about these situations for a second:
In the strict sense as Bernd Rohrbach described in 1968, the brainwriting technique should be accomplished by 6 persons who write down 3 ideas, within 5 minutes. After round six you'll have 108 ideas within half an hour. That's why this technique has also been called the 6-3-5 brainwriting method. Brainwriting has, however, been used equally sucessful in smaller and in larger groups.
Professor Bernard Nijstad did research on better brainstorming techniques. He gathered several teams in his lab and had half the teams brainstorm traditionally. The other teams would write down their ideas on pieces of paper, and pass them on to other members of their team.
Nijstad didn't only tally the number of ideas that the teams collected, he also had them evaluated by an independent jury. It turned out the brainwriting method generated twice the number of ideas, but also twice the number of good ideas.
Bonus: Download this brainwriting template (PDF) to put this brainwriting-technique into practice.
Brainwriting can also be done online, even in our Husky Marketing Planner application. Each project has a place to gather notes or write down a strategy. The only thing you need to do, is write down the issue, come up with a few ideas and send your colleague the link to the web page. They'll need to write down their ideas and comments and pass it on to the next one.
Do you want to know why Husky can be an asset to all your notes?
