A good advertiser knows his or her audience. An even better advertiser is one who comes up with a unique and interesting way to market the brand or service. A way which is disruptive, piercing and stands out the most with the essence of the brand message clear as crystal. This requires a specific way of thinking, a divergent, out of the box thinking that’s capable of coming up with something original every time.

Divergent thinking enables us to think of multiple other ways to do one thing, it trains us to come up with things on the spot, and makes anything we do stand out. It’s an absolute game changer if you work in advertising as it equips you to be prepared with absolutely anything. Divergent thinking in advertising also helps you adapt to the changing times and trends of the season and produce content accordingly that would fit in perfectly to relate to or amuse the target audience.

One of the worst pieces of advice I hear people give students is to “not have fun in class.” There’s this fear that smiling, goofing off, having fun, or cracking a joke will send a message to students that learning is not Serious. Students will act crazy. Chaos will ensue. Desks will fly. Trash cans will burn. You get the idea…

But I found the opposite to be true. Humour, goofiness, joy, fun — these were actually vital to developing a creative classroom culture. We experience Divergent Thinking in most of our classes and we are thoroughly engaged through activities, games and a very different approach to learning.

Perhaps Divergent Thinking is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope.

That’s the same thing we do during our strategic activities basically the divergent thinking tasks. We look at a common element of our world that everyone else sees, but we utilize those elements in a way that wasn’t thought of before.

I remember when we did our project for Creative Land Asia, it was a wonderful experience, we had to find unusual, non-obvious solutions to a problem. So we had to focus on divergent thinking, and suggest solutions which were original and Non-stereotypical.

According to me Divergent Thinking is very important to the advertising Industry. I will always remember how our professor kept on emphasising the importance of dismissing your first idea or approach. The aim being, to force you to push your creativity further and explore all possible solutions to a problem. While the rule seems very simple it was an effective technique to increase your creative output and the likelihood of finding a better solution to a problem.

And last but certainly not the least, the most obvious advantage to it is that it simply helps an advertiser produce good work. All the best advertisements of the world are memorable for one reason, is that they stand out from the rest in some way, what makes them truly iconic is their ability to completely disrupt the norm and start something new, be it an idea, a trend or a joke.

The article is been written by Zaie Bhongade, an NMIMS School of Branding & Advertising student, under the mentorship of Ms. Priya Menon.