There are things that are impossible. There are things that are possible, but have yet to be tried. Then there are things that are called impossible because they have never been tried.

On July 20, we will commemorate 50 years since the first man walked on the moon. That was a very big deal in the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, space travel seemed like an impossible dream. In 1957, the Soviets were the first to launch Sputnik 1, a round satellite about twice the size of a basketball, into orbit. It ran out of battery power in three weeks. A couple of months later, it fell back into our atmosphere and burned up. Then there was a race to get the first man into space, which both the Soviets and USA did in 1961. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first person to fly in space. His flight, on April 12, 1961, lasted 108 minutes as he circled the Earth for a little more than one orbit in the Soviet Union's Vostok 1 spacecraft. He traveled 203 miles above the earth before descending back to earth. A mere 23 days later, the USA launched Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7 on May 5, 1961. Freedom 7 was launched 116 miles into the atmosphere and returned 15 minutes later. Until then, space travel seemed only the subject of science fiction. But to send people to the moon seemed totally out of reach. It is one thing to shoot a man a couple hundred miles into orbit. The moon is 238,900 miles from earth! Many said it was impossible! Of course we know that it wasn’t impossible, it just had yet to be tried.

Let’s talk about business. Are there limits to your business – how big it can grow, how many product or service offerings it can successfully sell, the impact it has on its marketplace? Yes, we all have limits. But we often substitute words like limits for what it really is - fear. We are afraid to try because we don’t want to fail. Risk can be a scary thing. Failure can be devastating. So our fear causes us to deem something is impossible without even trying. Basketball star Michael Jordan said, "Limits, like fear, are often an illusion.” The truth is, we cast off the thought of new ideas pretty easily to protect ourselves from failure. But failure is a teacher and it helps us correct our path to achieve something much bigger.

Here is where marketing can help you explore the limits of your business possibilities. When NASA made plans to put a man on the moon, they took the lessons they learned from the earlier flights and tested new ideas. You don’t think they sent a man to the moon the day after Alan Shepard completed his 15 minute space flight, do you? No, it took eight more years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon. Getting them there and back home was something that took years of engineering and testing to achieve. But it was possible and it did happen after years of trying. A marketing plan, when it is working correctly, tests and then measures. We have wonderful analytical tools available to us to verify the success of marketing. I would encourage you to do two things: find out what your target market wants from you. Come up with ideas that push past the limits of what your customers want. Market those ideas and build a response into your marketing that can be measured. Keep track of the response and build upon what you learn.

Here is the other thing you need to know: innovation is very marketable. It sells! It also begets new ideas. Let me ask you a question: do you have a cell phone? Do you know what the inspiration behind the cell phone was? You can trace it back to the space race, when we were trying to put man-made communication devices into orbit. Without the space race, you would not have any kind of mobile device today.

What has been called impossible in your business? Is that because it really is impossible or has it just not been tried? And if you decide to take a risk on something new, make sure you are using marketing to help you explore the outer reaches of your possibilities.

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Photo courtesy of NASA