A Big Idea is bet. You do your strategy work to understand your customers. And then you try to come up with a Big Idea that will resonate with those customers. GOATs are Just Do It, Think Small, Got Milk, Think Different, A Diamond is Forever, and The Best a Man Can Get.
The playbook has been – You keep trying a new Big Idea (a new bet) at most every year until you strike on something that resonates with customers and pumps your sales. You then stick with that Big Idea until your customers or competitors change in some way that stops your Big Idea from working. Some Big Ideas work for a few years like Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”. Some end up working for more than fifty years like “Have a Break, Have a KitKat”.
Brands could only try one Big Idea a year (for brands that hadn’t yet hit their jackpot Big Idea) because it was too expensive to try more than one.
To get a Big Idea to the point it can go public for a large global consumer brand, might cost $30m+. The money would go into strategy, Big Idea development, creative development, creative expansion across markets, and production.
But AI changes that math. It might reduce this cost from $30m+ in some cases to $10m+. This is mainly because AI can reduce production costs.
This makes it possible to try two or three Big Ideas a year. And that can double or triple the speed of hitting your Big Idea jackpot.