We explore why creativity is such an opportunity for business growth. Learn what scares people about creativity and how to reframe that to see the positives of the creative opportunity. Read this to start thinking more creatively about creativity.
There are 3 different views on the link between “business” and “creativity”.
Some think it means “creative accounting”, that well-known euphemism for dodgy finance practices. Not what we think it is, so let’s quickly skip past that.
Others think of businesses that specialise in creativity. For example, creative agencies that design your packaging, make your advertising campaigns and write your sales copy. And yes, there’s a production aspect to some areas of creativity that usually requires specialist help.
But if you focus on creativity specifically within your own business, most people think of it in terms of creative thinking. This is usually seen as a sort of playful bolt-on to the more serious matter of running the business. Maybe a once-a-year offsite part of the marketing planning process where you get to write ideas on post-its that you know are unlikely to ever happen?
Then, the next day, you go back to your usual routines. Writing reports. Reading reviews. Catch-ups and info-sharing sessions. Never thinking about all those pesky creative ideas ever again.
Most businesses operate on routines. Routines are great when your goal is efficiency. Well-thought-out procedures and rules help create good habits where your business can efficiently implement known solutions.
Parts of the business responsible for managing these routines include :-
Even marketing and sales teams have regular processes like market research, brand planning, customer reviews and account planning.
It’s often said that people are creatures of habit. And yes, habits can be a good thing. Doing habitual activities well to drive efficiency is usually a good thing in business.
However, your business habits might also be focusing your attention on the wrong things. You might be very efficient at doing things which have no impact on your growth. Or worse, they blind you to changes in the market so that you stick with doing things that customers no longer care about. For example, Blockbuster Video was very efficient at getting products out to its stores. But when streaming came along, that didn’t matter any more, and it was bye-bye Blockbuster.
No, you need to make sure your efficiency efforts are focused on the right tasks. The tasks which make your business more effective. And this is where the creative opportunity comes to the fore.
When you step out of operational “mode” and into creative “mode”, life feels different.
You park the busy “doing stuff”, and instead, you think. You review and reflect on what you’ve been doing. This can feel uncomfortable as you ask probing questions about whether the business has been doing the right things.
Is what we’ve been doing working? What’s worked? Not worked? How can we improve our customer offer? What’s happening in the market with customers and competitors? Should we change things? Be more innovative?
Answering these sorts of questions helps your business become more effective. But it’s a different sort of habit you have to develop. Your goal is to understand where you’ve been, where you are now, and to explore where you go in the future. You use open-minded thinking to find the ideas your business needs to hit its future goals.
Instinctively creative people see this change and unpredictability as a positive thing. Something exciting, where you get the chance to explore new ideas. To be more playful and original, and less obvious.
However, such creators are rare creatures in business. Instead, most businesses tend to have more critics (those who kill ideas and put up barriers to creativity) and coasters (who are ambivalent about the idea of creativity).
For example, try to persuade finance, IT or supply chain to back your brilliant new idea, and you soon learn that not everyone sees being creative as an opportunity.
This is because most people prefer their comfortable operational routines to the more uncomfortable habits of creative thinking. Routines are comforting because you know what’s coming and feel you have some sense of control.
It’s more taxing on the brain cells to imagine an uncertain future. Plus, this stirs up strong emotions, especially fear, as you feel less in control. We tend to fear what we don’t know, and in creativity, there are lots of unknowns at the start of the creative process.
A big part of realising the creative opportunity is how you get people to think about this fear differently and get past the barriers that it creates.
The way you do this is to reframe that “fear” as an opportunity. To talk about the benefits creativity brings and how you can use creative thinking to grow your business. You reframe the fear by showing how creativity leads to new ideas that drive breakthroughs and innovation.
Though creativity helps any part of a business where you need to solve problems, its most obvious use is in marketing. Many marketing challenges need creative thinking to attract customers and build better brands.
The most common uses of creativity in marketing involve :-
Marketing starts with customer understanding. You do market research to find out their needs and learn how they make decisions. But then you create products, services and experiences that meet those needs so that those customers choose your brand. That’s how you connect with customers. Without creativity, you’d have nothing to sell and no way to connect with customers.
Creativity prompts the ideas you put into your market research brief. It shapes what you do with the research answers you find. Your innovation to create something completely new or improve your existing offer. Every part of your 4Ps – product, price, place, promotion – can’t happen without creative thinking.
So, the first big creative opportunity is that you need it to connect with customers.
Because if you don’t, someone else will.
Arguably, marketing is a creative competition between brands. The winning brands are those that are most creatively able to meet customers’ needs. So creativity is also needed to help your brand stand out from competitors.
Few brands can offer something truly unique. Someone, somewhere, will offer something that more or less meets the same needs as you do. So, you use creativity to pull yourself away from the pack.
As adman Bill Bernbach once famously said, “It may well be that creativity is the last unfair advantage we’re legally allowed to take over our competitors.”
The creative opportunity here is about building a more distinctive brand identity. Creative thinking helps you build your brand positioning and benefits. It helps you polish its personality and tweak its tone of voice. All your brand’s visual assets, from its logo to its colour palette, start with creative thinking.
If every other brand is doing the same things as each other, creativity is how you set your brand apart.
Lastly, and most obviously, you need creative thinking and creativity to activate your brand. To bring its key benefits to life at every stage of the customer experience.
Creativity drives all the brand assets you create – the copy, photos, videos, stories, designs and other assets which bring your brand to life. In your advertising campaigns and your SEO. On your website and your product pages. In what you share on social media and in how your customer service team talk to customers.
None of these things would exist without creativity. So, it’s key that your business has a culture and process that supports that creativity.
Culture in a business refers to how things get done.
It can cover many areas, and so can be a complex and challenging area to manage.
But for now, we’ll cover which areas of culture to focus on to help you create more breakthrough ideas :-
People refers both to individuals and to teams in your business. As we said earlier, you might need agency creative experts to help with specific executions (e.g. making adverts). However, you should encourage creative thinking from everyone who has to solve problems or come up with ideas in your business.
So, establishing a creative culture shapes the type of people you hire. For example, you look for people with a track record of thinking creatively and avoid those more likely to kill ideas. You look for those who show they can work creatively both on their own and in project teams.
It shapes how you train people in your business. You challenge your teams with creative problem-solving tasks, then work with them to gather feedback and learnings so they can continue to grow their creative acumen.
And, of course, it shapes how you organise and reward the people in your business. That could be empowering more agile project teams. It could be offering incentives to think more creatively or at least recognising and celebrating examples of breakthrough ideas.
The leadership team sets the direction of the business’s creative thinking.
They must make teams feel safe pushing the boundaries with new ideas. This means encouraging teams to take calculated risks rather than avoiding risks altogether.
They should regularly highlight creativity’s value and help build it into good creative habits.
For example, how they manage areas like creative evaluation and approvals, which shape how ideas make it through a business.
It’s about building open-mindedness and curiosity into your processes so that you nurture rather than naysay ideas.
Creativity starts at the top. The leadership team must lead by example. When they encourage ideas, you soon have a whole pipeline of them, as people feel more motivated to be creative. But if they regularly kill ideas, people will stop offering them, and your idea pipeline dries up.
It’s also up to the leadership team to ensure resources – money, people and time – are put into the right creative areas. They should encourage teams to make the best use of those resources to come up with more creative ideas.
Those resources can also go into helping to build a more creative environment in which to work.
For example, having more open-plan offices makes it easier for people to share ideas. Plus, quiet spaces if people need time to think on their own. Or even going off-site for particularly challenging creative problems.
It can mean having specific areas dedicated to creativity with the right materials (e.g. whiteboards, flip charts, marker pens) and lots of playful creative stimuli (e.g. creative books, magazines, art and musical items).
Environment also covers when creative thinking happens. This can be trickier to plan for.
People often get ideas in random places. Out for a walk. In the shower. Looking at their phone on the train. You need your environment to be flexible enough to let people’s minds wander. But you also need some structure to make sure these ideas get captured and don’t get lost.
Some creative businesses encourage idea boards in the office, for example. Or they set aside specific times when people can just think about new ideas. Those are the types of businesses that appreciate the creative opportunity and that are likely to have the most creative ideas.
In the day-to-day grind of operating a business, it’s often easy to overlook the creative opportunity.
If you’re constantly putting out fires and are comfortable with your usual routines of report-writing and efficiency-reviewing, creative thinking may seem like :-
(a) too much hard work or
(b) a bit of fun to be saved for a future planning day.
Yet, creativity is at the heart of making effective business decisions. Your business must be efficient AND effective to succeed. You only find effectiveness when you build a strong creative culture and encourage your people and processes to be more creative.
We showed examples in this guide of how creativity helps you connect with customers, build your brand identity and activate your brand. But this only scratches the surface of what creativity can offer your business. With an open-minded approach, creative thinking opens up your business to a whole world of new opportunities.
Check out our how to be a more creative company article for more on this. Or drop us a line if you need help exploring an unresolved creative opportunity.
The Three-Brains team know a lot about creative skills. We can help you use creative thinking to come up with clever, brand-building ideas. We then help turn those ideas into action with creative advice and support in areas like writing, graphic design and brand storytelling.
Check out our coaching and consulting services to learn how we can help you. Or get in touch if you need specific creative thinking help.
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