‘Creativity is the last legal way to gain an unfair advantage.’
Maurice Saatchi said this, and in so doing put creativity on its proper pedestal. Creativity, clever thinking or thinking laterally, horizontally – anything but in straight lines. Human beings have learned to be ingenious. It’s up to us to exploit this.
What is creativity?
Creativity is magic. It achieves the unexpected. It takes us to new places.
Yet very few understand what creativity is or how to value it and fewer know how to be creative. There is some bizarre impression that random non sequiturs may be creative and that you have to be crazy to be creative.
But this is changing. Creativity is now on the management agenda. In fact, the art of creativity lies in making connections, in cross-referencing ideas so people start to think in a different way. Creativity is about being relaxed enough to have lots of ideas, not just one great one.
At the very heart of brilliant marketing is a series of ingredients, but most of all, and most excitingly, is the creative idea – something that is in some way inspirational and that catapults the objective you’ve set yourself into engaging in real action. Is it likely to create momentum, a sense of something changing? Creativity lies in words like ‘Yes, we can’ – thank you, Barack.
Practise laughing – tell jokes, look at funny commercials. Laughter and creative thinking go together.
There are certain preconditions of being creative:
- a right-sided brain on red alert
- a fully attuned sense of curiosity
- a lot of material to play with – a blank sheet of paper alone is not a good thing
- a sense of the need to produce something
- laughter
- being yourself
- taking a deep breath and asking yourself ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – often the answer simply comes to you. (This last one comes from Professor Michael Ray, Stanford University – try it.)
Always listen to your inner voice (you may have 50 reasons to do something but if your gut isn’t saying ‘yes’, don’t do it).
Why creativity matters so much in marketing is because we’re trying to do quite difficult things – to be noticed, to change opinion or to strengthen opinion, to provoke action. We are not going to achieve those (especially being noticed) by being recessive or ordinary. Human beings like creative things. They like clever things. And they like funny things; hence the runaway success of that TV series QI.
- Skype – making talk free and easy.
- The Oyster Card – making travel simple.
- Use-by dates on food – the biggest contributor to increased food sales and better health.
- PayPal – making paying for stuff online safer.
- Prius – put solar panels in their car roofs because they discovered a lot of their owners were prone to have a snooze in their car at lunchtime and wanted the air conditioning on but didn’t want to leave the engine running.
- Prêt-à-Portea at the Berkeley Hotel – wanted to do something creative for ladies who’d lunched and now wanted to have a stylish tea. So the people at the Berkeley created designer fashion biscuits, with each designer contributing to the colour and shape of their own range.
- Boutique camping – the progeny of years of Glastonbury. Really comfy tents that are brilliantly appointed. Luxury loos and shower blocks are now provided at key events. Sleeping in the open air is the new 5* experience.
- Two from M&S – Airflex soles that are incredibly comfy and diminish foot odour in shoes – (air conditioning for feet) and ‘coin-catcher’ trouser pockets designed to stop your change falling out.
The power of creativity
As a nation, creativity is what we are really good at – best at advertising, best at marketing (and about to get better) and highly inventive (Dyson is one of many, and the chief designer at Apple, Sir Jonathan Ive, is British). So our opportunities as designers, inventors and simply at being cleverly creative are enormous. We need creative-ideas-villages, not business parks, and we need a lot of them, so that one group’s ideas can rub off on another’s.
The magic of creativity in marketing is to find a new way of packaging an old idea. It’s about getting people to notice, say ‘wow’ and pick up the product. Creativity allows you to think about, see and feel things in a completely new way. It’s what creativity does, not what it is, that matters.
Learning how to be creative
So how do you get into the creative zone? Here’s a ten-point programme that can begin to turn you from a corporate duckling into a suave, creative swan:
- Creative identity
Think about two ways of introducing yourself to a room of people – the safe way and the dramatic way. ‘My name is Richard Hall. I have worked in marketing, advertising, leadership and coaching …’ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Or ‘What on earth was I thinking about, giving up a nice solid job as a client to join the debauchery of advertising?’ … That’s slightly more promising. - Choosing creativity
Visit a shop and seek out two things you think are really creative and decide exactly why you think that is … find two things, by the same token, you think are really boring. - Think about creativity
Now do the same thing with two different kinds of art. But they must be different – music and poetry, a painting and a play. Ask yourself just why they stand out. Also question why you like them and see how many interesting or relevant things you can say about them. - Journey into creativity
Now go on a journey walking down a high street near where you live with a camera, taking pictures of anything that strikes you as interesting. Try and create a story around the ten most interesting pictures and how they enable you to describe the way the world is changing and what’s going to happen next. - Creative abundance
Don’t be suckered into believing during the initial creative process that less is more. Less is less. You need to fill pages, walls, rooms and mansions with your stuff. Prolific is good. Take a product, any product, but especially, for preference, one you like and write down in an hour on a big A2 pad as many different marketing ideas as you can think of that might increase sales. Then spend an hour picking the half-dozen or so that seem to have the most promise, and then spend another hour polishing those. - Creative teams
Fact is 1 + 1 = 3. Yes – synergy applies. That’s why you have creative teams in advertising agencies who are both copywriters and art directors – their roles often cross over. Try working with a kindred spirit whose opinion and creativity you respect. - Fast-forward creativity
Occasionally in a crisis you need to be able to come up with a bunch of creative options in very little time. Let’s suppose you hear a competitor is about to launch a well-priced product that competes with your main profit earner. This needs an exciting and fast response. - Mobilising crisis-creativity
When you have a specific challenge get a group of front-line operators together from call centres, PR, your advertising agency, your receptionists, salespeople, finance people. For a few hours get them to debate the challenge and report back their solutions. You’ll be amazed how brilliant they are. - Take lots of baths
It wasn’t just Archimedes who found baths useful. In a world of showers our creativity is under severe threat – so get in that bath and let your mind roam. The key is to wash away the spreadsheet cobwebs that corrode marketing today; and if you want to be really inspired just look at YouTube and the best commercials. - Meeting your consumers
And just maybe the most creative thing you can do is to get a bunch of your consumers together and have a conversation with them – maybe even over a beer or a glass of wine. You’ll learn a lot.