Why this idea means business : We explore how to find your creative place. Learn how to shape where creativity happens mentally, physically and with your audience. Read this for ideas on finding a better place to be creative.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To develop a better creative place that helps you find more and better ideas to grow your brand. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – Innovation
- Skill area – Creativity
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. monthly purchases from innovation adoption = +40
- Est. sales increase = +$4k (monthly) | +$48k (annual)
For some people, the question, “Where are you?” triggers bad childhood memories. Panicking parents desperately trying to track down a lost child.
Wanting to know “where” someone or something is sits deep in our subconscious. No one likes to feel lost, or like they’ve lost something.
Everyone and everything in their place means all’s good in your world, right? However, staying “in your place” also means that you go nowhere. And that’s not so good.
A life that goes nowhere is dull. Predictable.
Creative people know this instinctively. They know that exploring opens their mind and boosts their creativity. So they seek out creative places to help their ideas flow freely.
What is a “creative place”?
The creative act, be that designs, stories, photography or whatever, has to happen somewhere. But that creative place occupies two different levels.
First, there’s what you create in your head. Your internal “mental” creative place is driven by your memories and your logical thought processes.
But there’s also the external “physical” creative place. Your location and its surrounding environment also shape your creative thinking.
From as broad as the country you’re in, to the specific room or outside space where you let your creative ideas happen.
Let’s explore how these internal and external places work and what that means for your creative process.
The mental creative place
You’ve probably heard that creativity takes place in the right brain, and rational thinking in the left. However, modern brain scanning techniques show this to be untrue.
In reality, neuroscience studies show that creativity is complex and involves different parts of the brain.
For example, Nancy Andreasen’s The Creating Brain showed that creativity is linked to memory. And memory is part of our emotional brain.
But creativity also depends on what she calls the association cortex, which is part of our logical brain. It’s the part of our brain which gathers and links information from other parts of the brain. That linking process “creates” novel connections, i.e. new ideas.
More recent research shows that the cerebellum, part of our instinctive brain, can also influence creativity.
At the basic biological level, what actually happens in your head when you’re being creative is a spark of electricity and a rush of hormones. Energy moves between brain cells and causes you to think in a new or different way. That’s the essence of how every new idea starts. It’s how ideas work.
Help your mind be more creative
However, think about it. Is your brain in this idea creation mode all the time? For example, when eating breakfast? On the bus? In that boring supply chain meeting? No, for most of us, the creating part of our brain seems to have a mind of its own.
However, good habits can encourage more creativity. Let’s look at 3 quick examples :-
- Suspend criticism.
- Make unusual connections.
- Keep a record of your ideas.
Suspend criticism
A classic brainstorming rule is to not judge ideas too quickly. There’s no such thing as a “bad” idea when generating new ideas. Quality matters more than quantity at the start of the creative process. As creative people will tell you, even the sh*t ideas act as manure to grow the seeds of great ideas.
So whether you’re on your own or in a group, save the criticism for later. Plenty of time for it when crafting and commercialising. As Dan Nelken’s A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters neatly puts it, tell your inner critic they’re a ding-dong.
Make unusual connections
Obvious ideas (and therefore ordinary ideas) happen when you pick obvious answers.
Need to drive awareness? Make an advert. Need people to try your product? Give them a free sample. Need to drive sales? Offer a price discount.
These might give you a short-term boost. However, no one will remember them long-term.
Why? Because they’re too obvious.
Truly creative ideas come from combining ideas in more unusual ways. When your creative brain thinks, instead of putting A with B, what if we put A with 3? Maybe we’ll create something less obvious?
For example, Steven Johnson’s excellent Where Good Ideas Come From shares how a key part of Gutenberg’s printing press was inspired by a mechanism used to crush grapes during winemaking. A modern equivalent would be Uber’s pivot from being a taxi service (delivering people) to a takeaway service (delivering food). These ideas combine things which don’t normally go together and create something new.
Keep a record of your ideas
Both cutting out criticism and making unusual combinations are signs of having an open mind. But the true test of open-mindedness is letting those ideas escape from your brain to occupy a more physical space in the world. Making them tangible.
Or put more simply, writing your ideas down.
Once an idea is out of your brain and exists somewhere else, it takes on its new life. It means you can easily come back to it to craft it further. Combine it with other ideas. Share it with others.
Creative people are fanatical note-takers. They write ideas down all the time. Some even organise them into an Ideas Database that they can use for inspiration to solve future problems.
The physical creative place
Most people’s idea of a creative place in a work context is what you typically find in an advertising agency office.
Lots of open-plan desks. Lots of different stimuli. Provocative posters on the wall, and mood-altering music playing on the office’s stereo.
And snacks. Lots of snacks.
There’s certainly some evidence that these cultural elements can help boost creativity.
For example, there’s a design psychology idea called the Cathedral Effect. It suggests wide open spaces are better for broader, open-minded thinking, while more confined spaces are better for making quick decisions when under pressure. (See this article for more on this).
However, what stimulates you is often down to personal preference, especially for different personality types. Extroverts are naturally understimulated and so benefit from being surrounded by lots of creative “noise”. Introverts, on the other hand, are overstimulated, so they benefit from having a quieter space in which to let their creative minds wander.
However, whatever your style, there are some common things you can do to improve your creative place :-
- move around a lot.
- gather creative stimulus.
- encourage playfulness.
Move around a lot
If you look at a problem the same way every time, you always end up with the same answer. To encourage looking at ideas differently, it helps to change your perspective. Break your normal routine. Be a creative explorer.
For example, change your location. Go for a walk. Sit in the park. Visit a library or art gallery.
You might see or experience something that will stimulate your brain differently.
Take photos and notes of everything you see that captures your attention.
Or change the way you look at the problem. Write it on the smallest Post-it you can find. Or get a projector and beam it as large as you can on your wall. Spell it out with Lego. Or M&Ms. This gets you away from staring at it on a screen and nudges your brain into more creative thinking.
(You can also do this mentally using techniques like the Six Hats approach).
Gather creative inspiration
As we said earlier, interesting ideas come from combining unusual thoughts. You can kickstart that process by gathering quirky ideas that catch your eye. Use these for creative inspiration when you need your creativity to go in new directions.
For example, read books dealing with different aspects of creativity. Visit creative websites like Behance, Dribbble and Digital Synopsis. Look for other creative people and grab examples of their work that you like to use for inspiration next time you suffer from a creative or marketing block.
Encourage playfulness
It’s often said that most people’s creativity peaks in childhood. It’s when we’re most full of imagination and wonder, unhindered by the many adult barriers that make us fear creativity.
You can’t regress to childhood. However, you can make your creative place prompt a more child-like sense of playfulness.
Fill it with colourful items that have high sensory appeal. Objects that look good and smell good. Music to fill you with joy. Fill it with items you can physically interact with and play with.
Oh, and creativity can be tiring. So make sure you’ve got plenty of snacks to keep your energy levels up.
Connect with your audience in a creative place
Of course, for your creative ideas to make a difference, other people have to experience them.
In some creative fields, where that happens is obvious. Authors share their ideas in books. Musicians on records and performing live. Actors on stage or screen.
In marketing, your marketing plan normally decides where this external creative place is.
For example, your media plan determines where and when your advertising appears. Your customer experience plan decides where and when customers interact with your brand. And of course, there’s the “place” element of your marketing mix – where and when customers will buy your product or service, and what your brand does to stand out and attract customers there.
Conclusion - Where to find your creative place?
Creativity can happen anywhere.
However, some places are better suited to being creative. And where you find those places is very much a journey of personal exploration.
We’ve shared some ideas here about how to make the search for your ideal creative place easier.
How to open up your mind more, so that your inner creative place has more freedom to roam.
How to surround yourself with creative stimuli that encourage you to be more playful. And how to think about where your audience will experience your creative ideas, so that they land with maximum impact.
For more on this, check out our 5Ws of idea generation article. Or drop us a line. Maybe we can find a mutually collaborative creative place to hang out?
Photo Credits
Colour umbrellas : Photo by Malte Bickel on Unsplash
Skull : Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash
Man looking at ceiling (adapted) : Photo by Anton Danilov on Unsplash
Leaf growing : Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
I am bold : Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash
Person writing near mug : Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash
Open plan office : Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Lens : Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
Woman looking at phone in dark room : Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash
Kid squeezing paint tube : Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash
People taking notes : Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash
