Fool me, until I realise the date.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me 7 times and I need to get a calendar.

Friday was April Fools Day. I am typically crap with knowing the date, so there were a few things on Friday morning that left me a bit puzzled.

Looking through all the “new launches” there seemed to be a lot of April Fool brand extensions into pet products. I saw soda for dogs, subscription boxes even a matching making doggie app.

The pet industry has seen exponential growth over the past few years and there has been some really innovative brands emerging from Vegan dog food right through to grooming and care.

These new launches although a bit bonkers proved the importance of looking outside your category and use what other brands are doing to fuel your inspiration. The secret here is not to simply lift and shift, but to ask yourself why, what is going on at a behavioural and societal level that has led the brand to do this, and could this in any way be related to my product

Widening your horizon allows you to This is not about a simple copy and paste, but using it to understand the problem that this is solving for the consumer and asking yourself if yourself is your customer experiencing the same challenge and if so what could you do as a brand to do to help alleviate the pain point and add value.

I spent a large part of Friday going down of wormhole of trend reports and started thinking about all the cross-category insights that could be relevant to my clients and thinking about how we infiltrate routines, design lift and shift experiences, and provide personalised 1-2-1 coaching consultations.

Fair to say my creative juices are flowing and it’s all because I failed to check the date.

I would love to know where you have borrowed an idea from another category or you have seen it done really well.