Chapter 5
Engaging Your Marketing Imagination
In This Chapter
Achieving breakthroughs by being creative
Putting your creativity to use in advertising, product development, and brand-building
Making meetings and teams more creative
Taking charge of the creative process, from initiation through implementation
Good marketing depends on creativity. Marketers must always seek new approaches and reject assumptions and limitations. If circumstances aren’t going your way — sales are slow, the boss rejects your proposals, customers complain about service, or your Web site isn’t getting enough traffic — then remember to take some time out for creativity. The right creative idea at the right moment can turn the marketing tide your way. Here are three examples to help get your creative energy flowing:
Cross-promote with a dissimilar business. A nursery created a spring cross-promotion with a local bookshop. It provided the bookstore with bookmarks that featured garden plant identifications and photos, along with coupons worth 10 percent off all plant purchases. In exchange, the bookstore provided the nursery with a reference library of gardening books; the nursery included a sign on the rack thanking the bookstore for providing the books, along with coupons offering 10 percent off on purchases at the bookstore.
Create an instant buzz in a target market. The owner of a new pizza restaurant used door-hangers (small printed ads on heavy paper with a cutout at the top so they can be hung on front door knobs) to promote take-out dining. She hired kids from a local college to distribute the door-hangers in dorms and on houses and apartments in her neighborhood. The door-hangers included a summary of the menu, a phone number and Web site for placing orders, and a code for entering a contest to win a dozen party-sized pizzas and three dozen free sodas. The door-hangers and contest attracted a lot of attention, and soon business was booming.
Make a splash in public. A chiropractor had one side of his car decorated with a gigantic picture of a comfortable-looking sleeping woman. On the other side was a picture of the same person, shown as a skeleton to illustrate how well aligned her spine was. The car drew considerable attention and increased new patient inquiries by 200 percent in the month following its introduction.
With the techniques I describe in this chapter, you can harness your organization’s marketing imagination and spark incredible results — even if you’re a small business owner wearing the hats of marketing, sales, service, custodial, and so on. Not sure how to get started? I recommend checking your current level of creativity to see whether you’re maximizing the benefits creative marketing brings.
Turning the Tide with Creativity
Being creative can make a huge difference in your marketing in more ways than you may think. The next sections help you determine whether you’re being as creative as you need to be and whether making creative changes is worthwhile.
Conducting a creativity audit
A creativity audit can help you see whether you’re taking a creative approach as often as you should. Respond to each of the statements in Table 5-1 as honestly as you can, circling 1 if your answer is “rarely,” 5 if your answer is “frequently,” and the numbers in between if your answer is somewhere between “rarely” and “frequently.”
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Table 5-1 Marketing Creativity Audit |
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Marketing Creativity Actions |
Rating(1 = rarely; 5 = frequently) |
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We make improvements to the selection, design, packaging, or appearance of our product(s). |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We experiment with prices, discounts, and special offers to achieve our marketing goals. |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We find new ways to bring our product(s) to customers, making buying or using the product(s) more convenient or easier for them. |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We update and improve our brand image and the ways we communicate that brand image. |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We experiment with creative new ways of communicating with customers and prospects. |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We improve the look and feel of our sales or marketing materials. |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We listen to customer complaints or objections, and we find creative ways to turn those complaints into our next business opportunities. |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We change our marketing message before customers get bored with it. |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We reach out to new types of customers to try to expand or improve our customer base. |
1 2 3 4 5 |
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We share creative ideas and have freewheeling discussions with all the people who are involved in marketing our product(s). |
1 2 3 4 5 |
Add up all the numbers you circled to get a score between 10 and 50. Depending on your score, you can rate your marketing creativity as very low, low, medium, or high. You need to be in the medium range at minimum, but preferably in the high range, to gain bottom-line benefits from creativity.
10–19 = very low
20–29 = low
30–39 = medium
40–50 = high
As this audit points out, don’t leave anything alone in marketing. If you can identify any unchanging elements of your sales, service, advertising, mailings, or anything else that touches the customer, you’ve just found your next marketing project, detailed in the following section.
Changing (almost) everything
The smartest move to make when you have a stunning, timeless, classic success in marketing is to leave it alone. But how many of those kinds of concepts can you think of? An orange paper box of Arm and Hammer baking soda. The IBM logo. A Porsche sports car. A Swiss Army Knife. The Energizer Bunny. I can’t easily add many more items to this list, and I’m willing to bet your ad campaign hasn’t generated concepts that are in this list of timeless classics. If you’re not changing many of the aspects of your marketing program, I have to ask you a really tough question: Why not?
The most common reason marketers give for not changing their technique is that it takes too much effort. Nobody got around to thinking about it. As I bet you already guessed, I don’t consider that much of a reason to leave well enough alone.
Mess with everything. In fact, why not make a quick list of the aspects of your marketing program that nobody has looked at or tried to improve for the last year or two? Jot down three to six aspects of your program that you tend to take for granted (such as your brochures, Web home page, or price list). Tada! You’ve just made your creative to-do list. The remaining sections in this chapter can help you come up with creative improvements for the items on that list.
Are you working on the marketing for a start-up? If so, you still have to make that to-do list, but you get to backseat drive for the established leaders in your new market. What do other marketers ignore or fail to change and improve? Perhaps they always mail the same kinds of catalogs to the same lists on the same schedule throughout the year (in which case, why not send yours two weeks sooner in a larger, more attractive format, with a link to special offers on your Web site?). Or maybe the industry you’re entering always uses the Web to support its sales but not as its lead marketing medium (you can try reversing that formula). Whatever the constants, list them now. Your list shows you the assumptions that you must question if you really want to become the next industry leader.
Applying Your Creativity
Advertising — whether in print, TV, radio, outdoors, at the point of purchase, or elsewhere — is a key area of application for creativity. If you work in the advertising industry or use advertising in your marketing, you’re dependent on creativity for your success. Why? Because if your ads just say what you want people to remember, people won’t pay any attention to them. Too many other ads compete for their attention. Only the most creative ones cut through the clutter, attract attention, and make a permanent mark on consumer attitudes.
Think of the role of creativity in advertising as a vehicle for building relationships between your brand and your prospects. I find this a particularly powerful way to think about advertising’s role in marketing — and you can make this role possible with the addition of creativity to your ads. Marketers use creativity to add something special and unique that accentuates a brand’s differences and helps it stand out in consumers’ eyes.
To apply creativity to your business, identify your best sources of creative ideas and give some thought to the constraints you’ll bump into when applying creative ideas (such as budget limitations). Applied creativity has a purpose — to boost sales and profits and to help your marketing program succeed. The more sources you can work with, the better because you’ll get a lot of creative ideas. Then you need to check those ideas against a list of your major constraints. Do they fit your brand and marketing message? Are they unique? Or has some competitor used them recently? You get the idea, so grab a chart pad and make a table like the one in Figure 5-1 to help you identify your own list of sources and constraints.
To assist you with applying creativity to your marketing, the following sections provide different options for you to try.
Figure 5-1: Identifying your creativity sources and constraints.
Writing a creative brief
Any and all marketing materials, from advertisements and brochures to Web sites and packages, benefit from the use of a creative brief, a document that lays out the basic purpose and focus of a specific marketing piece and provides some supporting information that gives you grist for your creative mill.
Always include the following components in a creative brief:
Objective statement: State what the marketing piece is supposed to accomplish in your objective statement. Make the goals or objectives clear and specific (note that one objective is easier to accomplish than many). The objective statement also includes a brief description of whom you’re aiming the ad at because this target group’s actions determine whether you accomplish an objective.
Support statement: Include the product’s promise and the supporting evidence to back up that promise in your support statement. You use this point to build the underlying argument for the persuasive part of your marketing piece. The support statement can be based on logic and fact, or on an intuitive, emotional appeal — either way, you need to include a basis of solid support.
Tone or character statement: A distinct character, feel, or personality is what you’re going for in your tone or character statement. You choose whether the statement should accentuate the brand’s long-term identity or put forth a unique tone for the ad itself that dominates the brand’s image. The choice generally flows from your objectives, such as wanting to pull in a lot of shoppers for a special Labor Day sale. In this case, you, as a local retailer, want to give your event a strong identity, so you need to define an appropriate tone for your ad. In contrast, a national marketer of a new health-food line of sodas should build brand identity, so her creative brief needs to focus on defining that brand identity.
Constraints: Perhaps you face budgetary constraints, or you need to avoid certain terms, concepts, or images that your competitors have already used. Your brand image or product personality may also constrain you to approaches that are consistent with it. Be sure to give your constraints careful thought and list them as clearly as possible. Ask important questions to ensure you’re aware of any potential constraints. Such questions include the following:
• Are there actions a designer can’t do with your logo, like change the color?
• Are you trying to avoid looking like a particular competitor?
• Do you have to have vector art so that all images can be scaled up for big posters and scaled down for a blog or Web page?
• Is it important to produce work that can be shown both in full color and in black and white, depending on the medium and variations in your budget?
Clearly defining your constraints is perhaps the most essential part of writing your creative brief. Why? Because knowing the parameters in which your marketing piece needs to operate gives structure to your ideas and can prevent you from getting hung up on one that just won’t work.
Say you’re asking a graphic designer to work up an ad concept. You need to let her know what the dimensions of the ad will be when it runs and what file format it needs to be submitted in. If you’re not sure, have the designer talk to the ad rep who’s selling you the ad space to make sure the design is consistent with the ad specifications. And don’t forget that those specifications are more than just technical. They also include important do’s and don’ts related to your brand image or personality, constraints imposed by the competition and their legal protection over intellectual property (such as a branded tag line you can’t use), and so forth. (See Figure 5-1 for an exercise you can do to define constraints that should be mentioned in a creative brief.)
To put it all together, think about the task of designing a new booth for a trade show. If you write a creative brief first, you have to define what the booth should accomplish and what sort of customers you want to aim it at (the objective statement demands that you make these decisions). You also have to review (and maybe do some creative thinking about) the evidence available to support your company’s claims to fame. What may make you stand out among exhibitors at a trade show? If you aren’t sure, then use the demands of the support statement to do some research and creative thinking. Make sure you have your evidence at hand so your ideas for booth design can communicate this evidence effectively. Finally, you have to define the tone of your booth, or think about your company’s overall image and how the booth can reflect that image in its tone. The tone or character statement requires this step.
As this example illustrates, the creative brief forces you to do some helpful foundational thinking about the booth before you actually start designing it. As a result, you’ve made your designs more focused and objective driven than they would be otherwise.
Including creativity in product development
After you have your creative brief in hand (see the preceding section for help writing one), you’re ready to start brainstorming or using any other creativity tools you care to try (see the “Generating Rich Ideas” section later in this chapter for some helpful tools). The creative brief gives you a clear focus and some good working materials as you apply your creativity to product development. You can use your creative brief for any marketing communication, or for any situation in which you must design something creative to communicate and persuade. Sometimes what you need to design is a new or improved version of your product.
New products must be innovative to stand out. Managing a product development team so that it’s optimally creative and effective means first putting together the right team. That generally means a diverse team, one that includes the full range of knowledge that may be relevant. You need to include different functions, from sales and marketing to manufacturing and engineering, in the creative process. Why? Because they all have different knowledge bases that help generate good ideas. You need to bring them in eventually anyway, so why not now?
In mid-sized and larger companies, forcing closer interaction between research, business planning, marketing, and technical staff — as Kraft Foods does — is essential. That company (which generates several new products every year) uses a variety of conference-type events, training, and cross-functional teams to mix up its people and help them make those unobvious connections between their different knowledge bases. Small-business marketers need to pull together diverse development teams by reaching out to their distributors, customers, friends, and acquaintances to broaden their technical and social perspectives and fuel their imaginations.
Considering creativity and brand presentation
One of the most important steps you can take in marketing is to create a strong, appealing, distinctive, and easily identifiable brand image. Everyone knows the world’s top brands, such as IBM or Coca-Cola. How did these brands rise to the top? By using creativity appropriately in the development of their brand images and logos.
Creativity doesn’t play quite the role you may think in the creation of a powerful brand. Clarity, consistency, and strength seem to be more important than creativity when developing a brand name and logo, so you need to be careful to avoid being overly creative with your ideas. Try being creative in the following ways:
Start with clear, simple, strong logos. Logos are supposed to symbolize the product, so keep them clear and simple and use them consistently until they become highly recognizable.
Put these logos in front of consumers in association with appealing products. You earn brand equity by doing a good job. Your product and service need to be valuable to customers.
Include a steady flow of good marketing communications to create a brand that everybody knows and respects. This communication can include everything from packaging and ads to Web sites and good publicity. Always keep communicating. Never let your marketing program fall silent.
Interbrand (www.interbrand.com) is the largest consultancy specializing in branding, and it publishes an annual list of brands ranked by their value. For example, Interbrand values the Coca-Cola brand identity more highly than any other brand, but finds its value isn’t growing rapidly, unlike more creative, faster-moving brands such as Google. Table 5-2 examines the ten top brands as of 2009 (you can check Interbrand’s Web site for the most recent rankings). The style and coloring notes are based on my observations of these brands’ marketing pieces.
As Table 5-2 shows, these top brands and their logos share two important common factors:
Simple, word-based designs and names: By making the logo readable, the designers of these top brands made them especially easy to learn and recall. One exception to this simple and easy-to-read or say-out-loud plan is the 24th-ranked brand, Apple Computer, Inc. This company’s logo, an apple with a bite taken out of it, defies the rule that great brands spell out their names.
Simple, strong, conservative colors: Blue and red dominate the top brands; yellow pops up only every now and then. Brands that use two colors (such as 38th-ranked IKEA and 58th-ranked Amazon) usually draw from the conservative palate of blue, red, white, and black, with the occasional splash of yellow or gold. Having a creative mix of multiple colors is rare but not unheard of. Tenth-ranked Google does it, and so does 46th-ranked eBay, but most of the top brands favor a single color.
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Table 5-2 Examining Elements of the World’s Ten Top Brands |
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Brand |
Style |
Coloring |
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Coca-Cola |
Flowing, classic script |
Red |
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IBM |
Strong block letters |
Blue with white |
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Microsoft |
Strong, clean, conservative lettering |
Black |
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General Electric |
Elegant, traditional monogram of initials (GE) |
Blue with white |
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Nokia |
Modern block lettering |
Blue |
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Toyota |
Clean block lettering combined with elegant modern logo of elliptical forms |
Red in print, often silver on vehicles |
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Intel |
Lowercase modern letters in an energetic circle |
Blue |
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McDonald’s |
Curving, archlike M |
Yellow |
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Disney |
Whimsical scripted letters, often combined with iconic image of castle from amusement park |
Usually black lettering |
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Unusual lettering |
Mix of colors that often changes from day to day |
The goal of this formula (which combines simple, word-based designs and simple, strong, conservative colors) is to create a design that’s highly readable and clear to anyone, anywhere, whether shown large or small, in print, on a product, or on the Web. Although exceptions exist to every good formula, I suggest you start forming your brand identity by following this formula and seeing how it works for you.
Although great brands usually stick to simple, clear lettering and a conservative color palate, they build their value through creative advertising, creative product designs, and creative distribution to make sure consumers are excited about them. Keep your creativity on a fairly short leash when designing your brand identity, but let your imagination have a good run when it comes to designing other elements of your marketing program.
Generating Rich Ideas
Okay, time to be creative. Ready, set, go. Come up with any good ideas yet? No? Okay, try again. Now do you have some good ideas? What? No?
If you can’t be creative at will, don’t be alarmed. Most people face this problem, whether in or out of the marketing field. Artists practice creativity every day, but people in business generally don’t. As a result, most people have remarkably few creative ideas in a day, or even in a year. So when there’s a need to be creative in marketing, many people find that they require some help. How do you act creative? What’s involved in generating unusually creative ideas? No worries. The sections that follow can help you develop new ideas in all sorts of ways you may never have imagined.
First and foremost, give yourself permission to be creative in your work. Creativity requires you to let the mind’s engine sit in idle. You can’t be creative if you’re busy returning e-mails and phone calls or rushing to finish the day’s paperwork. If the hands are busy, the mind is distracted from creativity, and your imagination may not be able to work. So, for starters, I must ask you to budget time for creativity. How much time? Well, if creativity is the most powerful and profitable of the marketing skills, how often do you think you should use it? One hour a month? One hour a week? One hour a day? One day a week? You have to figure out exactly how much creativity time you need based on what your product or company demands. Budget some creative time and use it to open yourself up through new and different ways of working, asking questions, and exploring your marketing problems and opportunities.
Coming up with new ideas from simple activities
Creativity isn’t a science; it’s a habit involving the use of a loose collection of flaky behaviors. Like soaking up information, questioning the problem, tossing ideas back and forth with an associate, and then setting the whole issue aside to incubate in the back of your mind while you do something else. So plan to work in different ways when exercising your creativity.
Here’s a list of great activities that spur you to engage your imagination in new and unusual ways (when I lead creative retreats for marketers and ad agencies, I use dozens of ideas like these to get us going):
Seek ways to simplify. Can you come up with a simpler way to explain your product or your business and its mission? Can you cut your two-page brochure down to ten words? Can you reduce the length of a headline in your print ad from eight words to one? Most marketing and advertising is too complicated and can stand to be simplified. Creative insight can help simplify and clarify all aspects of your marketing. Simple is good because simple helps make your message bold, attracting attention and zapping the key idea immediately into the customer’s mind.
Think of a famous person from history and imagine that he or she is your spokesperson. How would this person change your packaging, advertising, Web site, and so on? For example, what would George Washington do to sell more of your product? Can you tie your brand into Washington in some way? Might his famous crossing of the Delaware River become a metaphor for competitors’ customers who need to be led over to your new and better product? “Follow me, customers. Victory awaits us on the other side of the river, where the new XYZ Brand has set up a more comfortable camp for you!” (Yes, that’s a silly idea, but you’d be amazed how often great marketing starts with silly ideas.)
Cut out faces from magazine ads and look for one that expresses an appealing new personality for your product. See whether you can use that personality in packaging and advertising or on the Web.
Come up with ways to advertise or communicate to customers with really small messages. This constraint forces you to clarify and codify your message in interesting ways. Try designing stamps, stickers, one-second TV or radio commercials, lapel pins, bumper stickers, or a miniature book that comes with a magnifying glass. See what else you can imagine. One of these ideas may actually prove useful for you. Even if you don’t use any of them, the exercise may get you thinking in fresh ways about marketing communications.
Brainstorm ways to advertise or communicate to customers with really big messages. Forcing yourself to change the scale of your thinking can free creative ideas, and if you communicate in unusual ways, you may attract more attention from customers. Could you advertise with dirigibles, oversized billboards or murals, or a message in which each word appears on a separate sign, spread along a one-mile stretch of road? (You can adapt this old-fashioned concept to e-mail with a series of one-word messages.) How about renting a large truck or bus and covering it with a marketing message or your brand name? Or maybe something simpler and zanier — like sponsoring a contest for who can bake and eat the largest cookie and then inviting the media to cover the event? Wait, I’ve got it! Why not make the largest alligator in the world into your mascot? Think big. You want to have a big impact, right?
Come up with interesting but inexpensive gifts you can give customers. Everyone gets pens with the company name on them — that’s boring. But what if your branded pens are different and better? Perhaps they’re the only ones that glow in the dark? Or maybe they have riddles on them and consumers can win a contest by entering their answers on your Web site? Try to think of some novel gift ideas. Focus on items that make the customer say, “Wow!” or “Hey, that’s cool, I can really use that.”
Find new places to advertise. Can you think of places to put messages to your customers that nobody in your industry has used before? An auto insurance agency could run an infomercial on the televisions that have been installed at some gas pumps. A men’s health clinic could put up hanging cases containing its business cards in men’s public restrooms. A computer repair service could offer a free laptop clinic under a tent in an urban park as a way to build awareness of its brand and abilities. The possibilities are practically endless.
Think of at least ten ways to get a famous person to use your product. Go ahead, give this one a try. Maybe you can come up with an idea good enough to actually pitch to the celebrity. Celebrities can bring media attention to a new product if they decide they like it.
Cut out five stunningly beautiful, strange, or otherwise eye-catching pictures from an issue of National Geographic magazine. Write a headline for each one that relates that picture to your product. This exercise may lead you to a great new ad concept that you can then turn into a finished design by obtaining the rights to use a similar photograph from a stock photography company. (If you want to use nice images like these in your advertising, you need to purchase the rights. See Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition [Wiley], for my starter collection of photographs you can use in your advertising.)
Making creativity a group activity
Most groups of people when confined to a conference room for a morning do little more than argue about stale old ideas. Or even worse, somebody suggests an absolutely terrible new idea, and the rest of the group jumps on it and insists the suggestion is great . . . thus eliminating the need for them to think. If you hope to get a group to actually be creative, use structured group processes. That means you need to talk the group into going along with an activity such as brainstorming.
In the following sections, I include some of the best group creativity techniques. I know that all of these techniques work because I’ve used them often with a wide variety of groups. Note that these techniques generally produce a list of ideas. Ideally it’s a long and varied list, but it’s still just a list. So be sure to schedule some time for analyzing the list in order to identify the most promising ideas and then develop those ideas into full-blown action plans.
Brainstorming
The goal of brainstorming is to generate a long list of crazy ideas, some of which may be surprisingly helpful. Brainstorming gets people to do out-of-the-box thinking — in which they generate unusual ideas beyond their normal thought patterns. Don’t let your group just go through the motions of brainstorming. To really get into the spirit of it, people must free associate — allow their minds to wander from current ideas to whatever new ideas first pop up, no matter what the association between the old and new idea may be.
You may need to encourage your group by example. If you’ve stated the problem as “Think of new ideas for our trade show booth,” you can brainstorm a half-dozen ideas to start with, just to illustrate what you’re asking the group to do: a booth like a circus fun-house, a booth shaped like a giant cave, a booth in the form of one of your products, a booth decorated on the inside to look like an outdoor space complete with blue sky and white clouds overhead, a booth like the Space Shuttle launchpad featuring hourly launches of a scale-model of the Shuttle, a booth that revolves, or a booth that offers free fresh-popped popcorn and fresh-baked cookies to visitors.
These ideas aren’t likely to be adopted by the average company, but they do illustrate the spirit of brainstorming, which is to set aside your criticisms and have some fun generating ideas. The rules (which you must tell the group beforehand) are as follows:
Quantity, not quality. Generate as many ideas as possible.
No member of the group can criticize another member’s suggestion. No idea is too wild to not write down.
No ownership of ideas. Everyone builds off of each other’s ideas.
After you share the rules, set up a flip chart and start listing everyone’s crazy ideas for the next trade show booth, catalog mailing, Web-based promotion, or whatever else you want your brainstorming session to focus on.
Question brainstorming
Question brainstorming involves generating novel questions that can provoke your group into thinking more creatively. This technique follows the same rules as brainstorming, but you instruct the group to think of questions rather than ideas.
So if you need to develop a new trade show booth that draws more prospects, then the group may think of the following kinds of questions:
Do bigger booths draw much better than smaller ones?
Which booths drew the most people at the last trade show?
Are all visitors equal, or do we want to draw only certain types of visitors?
Will the offer of a resting place and free coffee do the trick?
These questions stimulate good research and thinking, and their answers may help you create a new and successful trade show booth.
Wishful thinking
Wishful thinking is a technique suggested by Hanley Norins of ad agency Young & Rubicam and one that he has used to train employees in his Traveling Creative Workshop. The technique follows the basic rules of brainstorming, but with the requirement that all statements start with the words I wish.
The sorts of statements you get from this activity often prove useful for developing advertising or other marketing communications. If you need to bring some focus to the list to make it more relevant to your marketing, just state a topic for people to make wishes about. For example, you can say, “Imagine that the Web Site Fairy told you that all your wishes can come true — as long as they have to do with the company’s Web site.”
Analogies
Analogies are a great creativity-inspiring device. You don’t think I’m serious, I know, because the idea sounds so trivial. But many experts define creativity as making unobvious combinations of ideas. A good analogy is just that.
I once saw a great example of an analogy in a drug company’s print ad. The ad showed a painting of a person about to put a huge, old-fashioned key into a keyhole in the wall. The caption next to this illustration read: “Imagine ‘intelligent’ drugs that could tell sick cells from healthy ones, and then selectively destroy the targeted ones.” Illustrations often use metaphors or analogies when trying to communicate a complex topic such as selective drug therapies.
To put analogies to work for you, ask your group to think of things similar to the subject or problem you’re thinking about. At first, group members come up with conventional ideas. But they soon run out of these obvious answers and must create fresh analogies to continue. For example, you may ask a group to brainstorm analogies for your product as a source of inspiration for creating new advertisements about that product.
In ads and Web site copy describing its FreeMotion line of highly padded exercise treadmills, NordicTrack compares using its treadmills to riding a snowboard — an effective analogy that helps convey the idea that the product is fun to use.
Pass-along
Pass-along is a simple game that helps a group break through its mental barriers to reach free association and collaborative thinking. You can read the instructions here, in case you’ve never heard of the game:
One person writes something about the topic in question on the top line of a sheet of paper and passes it to the next person, who writes a second line beneath the first.
Go around the table or group as many times as you think necessary.
This game can be done with any number of people, from 3 to 20. In general, you’re trying to fill up a full page of lined paper, so bigger groups need fewer cycles. If people get into the spirit of the game, a line of thought emerges and dances on the page. Each previous phrase suggests something new until you have a lot of good ideas and many ways of thinking about your problem. Players keep revealing new aspects of the subject as they build on or add new dimensions to the preceding lines.
Say a team of marketing and salespeople meets to generate concepts for the product development department of a bank. Sure, that sounds like a tough assignment — what in the world can be new about banking? But you, the creative marketer, pick a subject and pass the paper around:
Subject: How can we make our customers’ personal finances run better?
Pass-along ideas:
Help them win the lottery.
Help them save money by putting aside 1 percent each month.
Help them save for their children’s college tuition.
Help them keep track of their finances.
Give them a checkbook that balances itself.
Notify them in advance of financial problems, like bouncing checks, so they can prevent those problems.
One idea leads to another. So even if the first idea isn’t helpful, associating new ideas from the first one can produce useful thoughts. A bank probably can’t get into the lottery ticket business (I’m sure there’s a law against that). But after the members of this group thought along those lines, they came up with some practical ways of increasing their customers’ wealth, like plans that can transfer money to savings whenever there’s a surplus after regular bills have been paid.
Here’s another fun pass-along idea: Ask people to help you find 20 words that rhyme with your company or brand’s name in the hope that this list may lead you to a clever idea for a new radio jingle or print ad headline.
Managing the Creative Process
If you think of creativity as generating wild and crazy ideas, you’re right — but only one-fourth right. Yes, you have to do some open-minded thinking to come up with creative concepts. But to actually make any money from your creativity, you need to have a mix of activities that includes exploring for new ideas and developing the best of them into practical applications in your ads, products, sales presentations, or other marketing activities.
In my creativity workshops, I show people how creativity needs to follow a four-step process to actually be of practical use in business. Here’s the process:
1. Initiate.
In this step, you recognize a need or opportunity and ask questions that launch a focused creative process. For example, you may take a look at your brochure(s) and ask yourself whether you can use an illustration and a catchy headline to make the brochure more exciting and powerful. Or if you run a women’s clothing store, you may recognize the need for a January sale to clear out fall and winter styles and make room for new spring fashions. Thoughts like these stimulate creative thinking and give it a practical focus. A creative brief (see the earlier “Writing a creative brief” section) is useful at this stage of the process.
2. Imagine.
In this step of the creative process, you engage in the imaginative, wild-and-crazy thinking that taps into your artistic side. The brainstorming techniques I cover in the earlier “Brainstorming” section are good for this stage; your goal is to see how many wild ideas you can generate. It’s a good idea to assemble a group to help you at this stage.
3. Invent.
Now you need to get more practical. Take a critical look at all of the wild ideas you imagined and choose one or a few that seem most promising. Work on them to see how to make them more practical and feasible for your application. For example, if you’re working on a way to announce a 40-percent storewide discount at a women’s clothing outlet, one of your creative ideas from Step 2 may have been “have nude models stand in the window, waving to passersby to attract public attention to the sale.” It’s an impractical idea, but can you use it as raw material for inventing a good promotion? One store I know of did by putting three full-sized mannequins in the window, each wearing only a poster board on a string around the neck. The first poster said “40%,” the second one said “OFF,” and the third said “EVERYTHING.” It was an eye-catching display, and it communicated the message forcefully — but it took an inventor’s persistence and practicality to translate a crazy idea into a good marketing communication.
4. Implement.
Finally, you need to complete the creative process by pursuing successful adoption or implementation of your new idea or design. You may have a great design for a new brochure, but you can’t make money from it until you carefully select a printing method and find a way to distribute that brochure to prospects. Or if you’re designing a window display for a retail store, implementation may mean finding the right mannequins, signs, lighting, and so on and setting up the display according to the creative concept or plan.
You may need different sets of talents to imagine wild ideas and to implement them in a practical way. In fact, each of the four steps in the creative process (initiating, imagining, inventing, and implementing) requires different types of behavior. By knowing this fact, you can discipline yourself to change your style as you move through a round of creativity that follows the four steps of the creative process.
Alternately, you may want to tap into the different creative styles of multiple people in order to take advantage of those who are particularly well suited for one or another of the steps in the creative process. When I work on creative projects in marketing, I’m particularly good at bringing imagination to the project, so I usually try to team up with someone who complements me by being really good at implementation.
Harnessing All Creative Types
Creative ideas are wonderful, but to profit from your imagination, you need to figure out ways to actually make those ideas work. Inventing practical ways to implement what you imagine, what I like to refer to as taking creativity to the bank, requires a focused effort on your part.
The creative process includes four steps (as explained in the preceding section) that rely on different types of behaviors. You may be especially suited to one or two of the steps, but you probably aren’t suited to all of them. I recommend you figure out which steps you’re best and worst at and then find people to help you fill your creative gaps. Read the following list of styles to see which suits your temperament best:
Entrepreneur: The entrepreneur senses a need or problem and asks tough questions to initiate the creative process. (“Why do we do it this way? It seems so inefficient.”) The entrepreneur proves valuable in the first step of the creative process, the Initiate Step.
Artist: The artist is highly imaginative and a free thinker. When given a focus for her imagination by the entrepreneur’s initiating question, the artist can easily dream up many alternatives and fresh approaches from which to choose. (“We could do this, or this, or this, or . . .”) The artist comes to the fore in the second step of the creative process, the Imagine Step.
Inventor: The inventor has a more practical sort of imagination and loves to develop and refine a single good idea until she makes it work. (“Let’s see. If we adjust this, and add that, it’ll work much better.”) The inventor is most productive in the third step of the creative process, the Invent Step.
Engineer: The engineer is practical and businesslike; she’s also particularly good at getting closure by taking an untested or rough invention the rest of the way and making it work smoothly and well. (“Great ideas, but let’s come up with a firm plan and budget so we can get this thing started.”) The engineer makes sure the creative process reaches its essential fourth step, the Implement Step.
Whichever one of these creative roles most closely represents your approach to work, recognize that one role alone can’t make great creative marketing happen. Be prepared to adjust your style by wearing some of the other creative hats at times or team up with others whose styles differ from your own. That way you have the range of approaches necessary for harnessing the power of creativity for all of your marketing efforts.
Head to my Web site, www.insightsformarketing.com, to download a sample copy of the Creative Roles Analysis (CRA) activity my firm publishes. With this activity, you can design more effective and productive creative teams. The CRA helps you make sure that you not only initiate but also complete the creative process often enough to keep your marketing innovative and new.