Marketing used to be a lot more unhinged.
Most businesses start planning a campaign by opening a content calendar. What should we post? Do we need a Reel, an email, or an ad?
Those questions matter, but they come too early. A format can carry an idea. It can't create one for you.
Earlier this year, I started collecting marketing stories that sound completely made up: an inventor cutting the rope on his own elevator, P.T. Barnum leading 21 elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge, and a pedometer company turning 10,000 steps into a goal people still repeat today.
None of these campaigns worked simply because they were strange. Each one started with something the audience needed to believe, then found a way to make that belief visible, reassuring, or easy to remember.
That is the part worth borrowing. Not the elephants. The permitting would be a nightmare.
1. Build trust before you ask them to book
In 1854, elevators already existed. The problem was that people didn't trust them.
Elisha Otis had developed a safety mechanism that could stop an elevator platform from falling if its supporting rope broke. He could have described the engineering. Instead, during a public demonstration at New York's Crystal Palace, he stood on the platform and had the rope cut.
The platform dropped. The safety brake caught it. Otis reportedly told the crowd, "All safe, gentlemen. All safe."
The demonstration worked because it made an invisible claim visible. Otis didn't just say the elevator was safe. He let people watch the exact moment his invention mattered. Otis still tells the demonstration as a defining moment in the company's history.
Borrow this: show the proof
Wellness businesses make important promises all the time. The process is thorough. Beginners will feel comfortable. Care continues after the first appointment. Almost any competitor can say the same thing.
A clinic that wants people to believe the first visit is thorough can show the stages of an initial assessment, not just claim it is complete. You don't need to reveal the entire service. You need to make the part people are most unsure about easier to see.
Campaign question: What are you asking people to believe that you could demonstrate instead?
2. Answer hesitation before asking for action
The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 as an extraordinary feat of engineering, but plenty of people were still afraid to cross it. Public anxiety became worse after a deadly stampede on the bridge only days after it opened.
The following year, P.T. Barnum led 21 elephants across the bridge. It promoted his circus, of course, but it also gave the public a wonderfully simple image: if the bridge could hold a herd of elephants, it could probably hold them too. The New-York Historical Society credits the spectacle with helping alleviate fears about the bridge.
Barnum didn't publish another explanation of the bridge's engineering. He created a symbol people could understand immediately and retell later.
Borrow this: answer the hesitation
Every campaign meets an objection, even when nobody comments or sends a DM to tell you what it is. Will I feel out of place? Is this actually meant for someone like me?
A studio launching a beginner program gets stronger when the campaign answers that quiet question instead of announcing that a new class exists. Introduce the instructor, show how the equipment is set up, and walk through what happens when someone doesn't know a movement. That picture does more than another round of availability posts.
Campaign question: What is the quiet reason someone might hesitate, and what could help them picture the opposite?
3. Make the idea easy to repeat
Ten thousand steps feels like a health rule that must have come from years of clinical research. It didn't.
The target grew out of a Japanese marketing campaign in the mid-1960s for a Yamasa pedometer called the manpo-kei, which translates to "10,000-step meter." As The BMJ explains in its review of the number's history, the target began with marketing rather than an established scientific threshold.
The idea lasted because it was specific, memorable, and easy to track. "Move more" is sensible advice, but it is difficult to repeat and even harder to measure. "Walk 10,000 steps" gives people a number, a goal, and a story they can pass along.
Borrow this: give the idea something people can hold onto
Strong campaign ideas often contain a phrase, number, name, or ritual that the audience can keep. The point is not to force every offer into a gimmicky number. It is to notice when your message is technically accurate but too broad to travel.
"Feel better this fall" could belong to almost any wellness business. A named seven day reset with one clear daily action gives people something they can recognize when they see it again.
Campaign question: What part of this idea could someone remember and repeat without reopening the post?
Start with the belief, then choose the format
Creativity is not dead. It has just been reduced to content formats.
When every campaign starts with "Should we make a Reel or a carousel?" the thinking gets smaller before it has a chance to become interesting. Start with the belief you want to change, then choose the format.
Before you build your next campaign, answer these three questions:
- What do we need people to believe?
Choose one shift, not the entire story of the business.
- How could we make that belief visible?
Look for a demonstration, experience, comparison, or symbol.
- What would make the idea easy to remember?
Give it a specific name, line, number, image, or repeated ritual.
That is the real lesson behind the elevator, the elephants, and the step counter. None of these ideas asked people to work harder to understand the message. They made one important belief almost impossible to miss.
You probably don't need a bigger budget or a more unhinged stunt. You need one point made clearly enough that people can see it, believe it, and tell someone else.
