Bob Hoffman, AKA the Ad Contrarian wrote a storming piece this week about how stupid people in business can’t do too much harm.

That’s because the companies that they work for have already achieved orbit.

That could be the reason why rash, social media driven decisions, no matter how misguided tend not to destroy companies completely.

Take PepsiCo for example.

In 2010 they launched the Pepsi Refresh Project that saw them divert most of their Pepsi advertising budget towards social media, most notably at the expense of their Super Bowl ad spot.

The project was an unrivalled failure and was clearly the product of a stupid person.

Despite losing some ground (-5% market share), things aren’t too bad for PepsiCo, they are still selling pop.

Despite making a decision that would have killed a lesser brand, consumers are on the whole oblivious to any change.

That’s because PepsiCo is in orbit.

As Hoffman explains:

“With enough energy, a satellite will escape the gravitational pull of earth and will achieve orbit. Once it achieves orbit, it operates on its own. It will circle under its own power for years. And the only way to knock it down is to get in its way.”

Businesses are the same.

PepsiCo and the brand Pepsi has so much history, so much advertising success and the weight of so many customers that they have achieved orbit.

PepsiCo has broken free from the gravitational pull of the world and has been orbiting for a long time.

It would take something catastrophic to take it down.

The governments of the world banning brown fizzy drinks would probably do some damage.

A stupid marketing executive isn’t that powerful though.

They can redirect the entire marketing budget to social media for a year and not worry too much about destroying the company.

So next time you see a big company do something rash, don’t just assume that it is a good idea because a big company ‘wouldn’t just do something stupid without having good research’.

Chances are it is a bad idea, just not bad enough to knock them out of orbit.

Everything creative you think of has been done before.

Stop fighting it, you won’t win.

Someone better than you did it first.

And then someone else did it again.

You are just repeating the cycle.

No matter how hard you try, nothing you do will be new.

Although this sounds like a desperate situation, it really isn’t.

Dave Trott champions predatory thinking.

Predatory thinking is about changing your perspective on a problem and only solving the part that you need to in order to reach your goal.

In practice, this means beating your competition instead of achieving perfection.

Trott tells the story of two men walking through the jungle being stalked by a tiger.

One of the men laces up a running shoe whilst the other scoffs: “you will never outrun a tiger”.

To which the other man replies; “I don’t need to, I just need to outrun you”.

The goal is to not get eaten.

Beat your competition and you achieve your goal.

And so back to creating something new.

To create something genuinely new is perfection.

It is hard and in most cases impossible – like outrunning a tiger in the jungle.

But why even bother?

True creativity is taking something that exists and showing it to a new audience.

To the new audience the thing will be new.

You know it isn’t, but they don’t.

One of the best examples of this is in music.

Pendulum is an Australian dance / rock music act.

They used to make run of the mill dance music.

To a seasoned dance fan’s ear the music was the same old thing they had heard before.

The true creativity of a band like Pendulum was to go chasing the affections of rock music fans.

They appeared in Kerrang magazine and played at rock festivals.

To rock fans, Pendulum’s music was absolutely new.

Yet the music isn’t new, the fans are.

But the fans don’t know that.

The band gets hailed as trailblazers by one camp and copy cats by another.

But at the end of the day they achieve their aim: sell lots of CDs.

Nothing is new, but your audience doesn’t know that.