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Business development insights and marketing strategy advice from the founders of one of the UK's most innovative brands, Innocent:

DAN GERMAIN: ...the first point of having ideas myself, I probably don't have my best ideas in here, at Fruit Towers at Innocent. I probably have my best ideas in loads of other places. So that might be in my car, that's a good place for having ideas.

It's those sorts of places where your brain switches to neutral, weirdly. So quite often it's just before you go to bed. And I do keep a notebook by my bed. I think I read it in one of Branson's books. He always talks about having a notebook there because you never know when you're going to think of something. And it's always that moment when you're kind of just dozing off. Because you're kind of filtering through what happened today and you weirdly filter through the couple of things you've got to do the next day. And you start to go, oh yeah we could do it like that, maybe we could do that. And then if then if you don't write it down, you'll forget it by morning. So having the notebook there by the bed, good rule.

In terms of how we do it in a, I guess, more formal way at Innocent. You know, do you gather groups of people together in a room and get the flip charts out and stick a thing on a blackboard and say, this is the problem and we need loads of ideas to solve this problem, to sell more drinks, to tell more people about what we're doing. It sometimes works when you get people in a room, if you get the right people in the room. What we found as a business is that you don't necessarily need lots of people who have the words creative or marketing in their title. You actually just need good people, smart people. Lots of the best ideas at Innocent have come from across the business, not from the people who's allegedly job it is to have those ideas. So those sessions, brainstorming, whatever you want to call them. Brain-dumping, brain-exploding things.

The problem with those, that I found at Innocent, is that if you start having quite a lot of those and you have similar groups of people in the room, you end up just getting the same ideas. You know, do the same thing in the same way many times and you'll get the same stuff back. Same room, same flip chart, same problem -- which is usually a variation of how do we sell more drinks. So, ultimately it all funnels down to how can we make better stuff and get more people to know about it and taste it and buy it. I think you're always going to come out with the same stuff. So dumb stuff like go and sit in the park and do it. Start off by looking at the tree instead of looking at the flip chart. And that might just, oh trees, trees are good, nature, what can we do that's to do with nature. All those sorts of stream of consciousness things. I find that more interesting. Going to different places, thinking about different things, starting in different weird places. And then you might work your way back to an interesting idea. Rather than starting off with the question on the flip chart and everyone is just staring at it going, uhhhh. I don't think that induces a great mental state, having good ideas.

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