I have been reading Jack Trout’s “In Search of the Obvious, the antidote for today’s marketing mess”.

The inside flap contains the context:

“The search for any marketing strategy is the search for the obvious.

We are in an era of killer competition. Category after category is perceived as a commodity. This fact is the central reason the critically important function of marketing is such a mess. It′s also why the average chief marketing officer barely lasts beyond two years in the job.

In this book, marketing guru Jack Trout clears up the confusion that surrounds the marketing profession. Instead of focusing on segmentation or customer retention or search engine optimization or data mining, marketers should be searching for that simple, obvious differentiating idea. Marketers not looking for the obvious had better have a very low price.

This search should begin with what Trout considers the best book ever written on marketing—even though it was published in 1916 and isn′t about marketing.

Entitled Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Business Man, it lays out the five tests of an obvious idea that will lead you to the right marketing strategy for any product”

And here are the Five Tests:

1. The problem when solved will be simple – the obvious is nearly always simple, so simple that generations of people looked at it without seeing it
2. Is the time ripe?
3. Does it check with human nature? i.e. would everyone understand it, without requiring any specialized knowledge?
4. Does it explode in people’s mind? i.e. “why didn’t I think of that?”
5. Put it on paper – does it still make sense when put on paper?

Most successful mashups whether they are produced as apps, widgets or dashboards rely on the above truths.