Marketcol/22″/mar30/mike1st/mark2nd
ALF NUCIFORA
Everybody professes to admire it. Most want to acquire it. Some even know it when they see it. In the marketing world, it’s normally a subject of interest to everyone.
It’s creativity. And it’s essential for marketing success in today’s environment where the average is the norm and mediocrity is in vast supply.
I took the subject to a panel of “creative” experts. I wanted to know how one learns to think creatively, to develop creative output and, most importantly, how to achieve it in a real, day-to-day working environment.
I’ve had experience with all three Atlanta-based panelists and consider each to have that special creative bent that makes one think differently and deliver a viewpoint that is inevitably far from the herd.
Joey Reiman is founder and chief idea officer of BrightHouse, author of the soon-to-be-published “Thinking for a Living: Creating Ideas That Revitalize Your Business, Career and Life.” Charlie Farley is chief creative officer at the P.R. and event-marketing firm of Cohn & Wolfe. Jamie Turner is president and chief executive of Turner & Turner Communications, an up-and-coming ad agency with a decidedly creative viewpoint.
Why is it hard to be creative? Reasons abound. When judged at 39,000 feet, most businesses today operate under short-term pressure namely the need to reduce costs and deliver increased quarterly earnings. As a result, CEOs are increasingly becoming tacticians rather than the strategists and theoreticians they were once expected to be.
Mix in the influences of homogenization and globalization, as well as the normal neuroses that prevail in the average corporate environment and it’s no wonder that creativity is nonexistent at worst or stifled at best.
What is it and how do we get it? It takes many forms, such as originality or uniqueness. It’s normally the progeny of risk taking and a love for the atypical and the special. More often, it seems so simple and so obvious when viewed in retrospect.
Common themes emerged from the discussion:
? Give it time. Creative ideas require time to incubate and marinate. So don’t rush the process. That’s hard for most companies to allow, because they see the process as “rest” time that could otherwise be put to better use making money. Need proof? How about the correlation between tight production deadlines and the miserable quality of the average television sitcom? Joey Reiman got it right when he said, “There should be room for daydreaming time.”
? Get a new perspective. The best creativity comes when you empathize with your audience. You’ve got to see things through the targets’ eyes. You have to inherit their skin. That’s the optimal frame of mind to make the creative perspective percolate.
? Eradicate the negative. Weed out levels of approval. Avoid language that suppresses creativity words like “no,” “faster,” “it stinks,” “will it work?” There are never any bad ideas in the creative development process. As Charlie Farley advises, “Don’t evaluate until you edit.” And always look for quantity of options. Better still, develop a process for generating overkill. You can never have too many new ideas.
? Out with the linear. The best creativity comes from a non-linear thought process. It’s OK to jump around, to be intuitive, to go with a hunch. Some of the best new ideas never passed the “rational” test.
? Live life. Personal experimentation and exposure is vital for the would-be creative mind. Do as much as possible. Read, travel, eat out, cook a gourmet meal, see a movie, try gardening, learn to play the guitar. You get the drift. Find time to get away to get outside so that you can look in. Says Jamie Turner: “The big, visionary ideas come when people get away from the daily tornado of the office environment.”
? Get the right people. Be willing to hire a different breed, including the weird, the misfits, the nonconformists. But always hire people with brains. Again from Jamie Turner: “Smart people are like creative volcanoes; they can’t stop the ideas from erupting out of their heads.” And be willing to put trust in young people. They have great ideas, but most experienced managers don’t have the wisdom to see whether the ideas will work.
? True rewards. This is always the ultimate test of whether or not you really believe in encouraging creativity: You should always reward when risk-taking succeeds. Even more important, you should reward risks that fail. That’s where the best lessons are learned.
Certain environments have nailed the creativity thing. Young, innovative, high-tech companies are making it happen by the hour. Imagine the high to be experienced from working in the more creative regions of the Disney organization. Wouldn’t you love to know what they put in the water cooler in the “Seinfeld” writers’ break room? I thought Joey Reiman’s comment said it best: “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
Charting the future
Trend analysis has normally been a domain reserved exclusively for the large corporate marketer. But nowadays, even the small business can have access to protocols and technologies that help foresee where marketing’s future is headed. That’s the word according to Minneapolis-based marketing experts Vickie Abrahamson, Mary Meehan and Larry Samuel, co-founders of the trend newsletter Iconoculture.
In a recent interview, the Iconoculture team revealed the process they use to read the future a process, incidentally, that the small-business marketer can easily copy.
Here are a few strategies for tracking and forecasting trends:
? Cast as wide a net as possible. As Yogi Berra astutely put it, “You can observe a lot by watching.”
? Sift through the clutter for cultural passion points. Issues like religion, sex and death are key clues to values, particularly appropriate to the Boomer generation, which is undergoing that very process of soul searching as it confronts the specter of mortality, AIDS and dying parents.
? View everything as a sign requiring decoding. Since every action has a significance, we should borrow from semiotics (the study of signs) to uncover the meaning of things that are around us.
? Look for connections, parallels and analogies. It’s more important to know in how many places trends appear than how long they’ve been around.
Alf Nucifora is an Atlanta-based marketing consultant. He can be contacted through his Web site at www.nucifora.com. Dan Turner is on vacation.
