Brainstorm useful ideas Explain what each one changes

Suppose a fictional hotel is busy on weekends but has empty rooms from Monday to Thursday. It also has spare meeting space. The client wants more weekday profit using the existing property.

That objective rules out some distractions. Building another hotel does not use the current empty rooms. Filling them at a price below incremental cost would not improve profit. A weekend campaign targets the wrong part of the week.

I would restate the prompt as: “How can we earn more contribution from the property on weekdays?” This is broad enough to allow different uses, but specific enough to keep the ideas relevant.

Frame the question so it leaves room for alternatives. “How can we advertise more?” has chosen a lever before you know whether awareness is the barrier.

For this hotel, three useful lenses are buyers, booking barriers and uses of the property.

These questions help produce ideas. Generic labels such as “marketing” and “operations” can organise an answer later, but may not help much when your mind is blank.

For a cost problem, use a process map instead: where does time, material or money get consumed? For a retention problem, follow the customer’s experience from joining to renewal. Match the lens to the problem.

For the hotel, you might generate:

• Local project teams: offer weekday room blocks with guest-name changes, helping employers whose staffing schedules shift.
• Training organisers: bundle the spare meeting room with overnight stays, reducing the effort of arranging a multi-day event.
• Visitors to nearby institutions: test agreements with organisations that regularly host weekday guests and value predictable availability.
• Existing business guests: offer a recurring booking arrangement with simpler invoicing, reducing administrative friction.
• Local workers needing occasional private space: test daytime room use where cleaning schedules and overnight demand allow it.
• Small companies holding meetings: sell the meeting space independently when accommodation is not needed, using an asset that is currently idle.

These are possibilities to investigate, not claims about what this hotel’s customers will buy. The next step is to select the most promising ones against the client’s objective.

If you evaluate every idea the instant it appears, you can get trapped refining the first suggestion. Generate a few distinct routes, then compare them.

Create enough breadth to reveal alternatives, then apply the known constraints. Adapt idea generation to the interview time available; you do not need a long workshop or an arbitrary idea count.

The interviewer should hear both range and judgment. Six versions of the same discount provide little range. Six unrelated ideas with no selection provide little judgment.

Suppose the case reveals that two nearby engineering firms frequently house project staff, but their dates and guest names change. That makes the flexible room block a stronger first test than a general advertising campaign.

You can say:

“I would start with the project teams. Their weekday need matches our spare capacity, and booking flexibility addresses a specific barrier. I would test a small block with those two firms before broadening the offer.”

Then define what you want to learn: incremental room nights, the price customers accept, cancellations, service costs and whether existing full-price guests migrate into the cheaper offer.

Assume the test sells 100 room nights at £80, with £25 incremental cost per occupied room night. Gross contribution from the offer is:

100 × (£80 − £25) = £5,500.

But suppose 30 of those room nights would otherwise have sold at £100. Those existing bookings previously contributed 30 × (£100 − £25) = £2,250.

Incremental contribution from the test is therefore £5,500 − £2,250 = £3,250, before any additional campaign or administration cost.

You can also see it as 70 new room nights earning £55 each, less a £20 price reduction on 30 existing nights: £3,850 − £600 = £3,250.

The idea can still be attractive. The calculation simply makes the benefit match what changed because of it.

If you have exhausted buyer groups, move to barriers or uses. Perhaps the hotel loses bookings because small firms cannot commit to fixed names, because invoicing is cumbersome or because the package excludes meeting facilities.

For an operational problem, move from reducing work to changing when it happens or where it is done. For a fixed-fleet transport problem, move from more vehicles to turnaround, schedules and allocation.

You do not need to become more exotic with every follow-up. A practical idea from a new angle is often more valuable than adding AI to an unchanged process.

Take one vague idea and expand it into a sentence containing an actor, an action and the intended effect. Then name the first test. Repeat with a different lens.

Try Reduce Fashion E-Commerce Returns. Generate ideas along the customer journey, then choose one based on the return cause it addresses. For another prompt, generate ways to fill a hotel’s empty weekday rooms, then rank them by incremental contribution and feasibility.