If you're in marketing you need to be creative. It's in the job description. Those in marketing are continually expected to produce new and innovative ideas on command for the corporate good.

For professional marketers, ideas represent solutions. I once had a plaque in my office that read, "When the answer is found it will be simple." The challenge is to take the complex, make it simple and then communicate it effectively.

The Quest for Good Ideas

In the 1940s James Webb Young, a seasoned advertising man, published a thin volume entitled "A Technique for Producing Ideas," based on a series of lectures he had given some years before. His pragmatic process still serves as the standard for the process of idea creation.

Mr. Young believed that, "An idea is nothing more or less than a combination of old elements." He believed that what distinguishes the creative mind is the ability to put things together in new ways, to find new relationships and juxtapositions. Creative people very seldom actually create. They simply reorganize, synthesize, reshuffle or combine things in a new way. As the great choreographer, George Balanchine, was fond of saying, "Only God creates, I just assemble very well."

Consider the case of Earle Dickson, who wanted to help his accident-prone wife. In 1920 Dickson took a piece of gauze, attached it to the center of a piece of tape and then covered the whole thing with crinoline to keep it sterile. Voila, the band-aid was born. Since then more than 100 billion have been sold.

To Think Like a Child

Creativity, then, is the ability to imagine new ways to use existing elements or ideas. The most creative thinkers are often children because their thinking has not yet been corrupted by adult society. They have no inhibitions and no preconceived ideas about what something means or how it should be used. Sigmund Freud created a technique called "free association" to help adults reconnect with this child-like way of thinking in order to more readily create new thoughts and ideas. Free association assumes that all thoughts and memories are arranged in a single associative network. Free association encourages people to begin with what they know about a problem, goal or question and then let the unfettered mind start creating a flow of ideas. Each idea, no matter how irrelevant or trivial, will trigger another idea, and so forth, until the solution appears.

To utilize free association to generate creative business ideas, marketers should begin with two key elements-specific subject knowledge and a clear, specific objective that is appropriate to the task. Framing the goal correctly is critical to success. For example, if Thomas Edison's objective had been to create "a way to make the room brighter," he might have simply invented a sconce that would hold many more candles than a candlestick. However, his objective was to find "a more sustainable source of light." To reach that goal, he had to think about other possible ways to illuminate a room-a thought process that led to the invention of the light bulb. The clearer your objective, the more likely you will recognize the "aha moment" when it occurs.

What If…?

Some of the best ideas are serendipitous-or simply mistakes. For example, Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanization when he accidently dropped a glob of rubber and sulphur on a stove. Arguably there are people who have trained themselves to benefit from serendipity. Benjamin Franklin invented innumerable things-including the lighting rod, bifocals, a musical instrument, the odometer and Franklin stove-because he maintained an attitude that allowed him to recognize the implications of a lucky occurrence. Marketers have a responsibility to develop a more intuitive perspective by teaching themselves to recognize the possibilities of every occurrence, problem or idea, rather than letting its potential pass unrecognized.

Persistence is also an important part of the creative process. Far too often the best ideas are considered "too different" by many in the organization. Take Chester Carlson for example. His frustration with the slowness of the mimeograph machine and the cost of photography lead him to invent a new electrostatic process, xerography, that reproduced words on a page in just minutes. Carlson had a hard time finding investors for his new invention. He was turned down by IBM, General Electric, RCA and the U.S. Army. It took him eight years to find an investor, the Haloid Company, which later changed its name to the Xerox Corporation-and the rest is history.

Another persistent and creative type was the prototypical marketing practitioner, a traveling salesman named King Gillette. On a trip around 1900, King dropped his straight razor, causing it to break in half. Looking at the pieces gave King an idea. After returning home to Boston, he glued the pieces back-to-back and then added housing and a handle to produce a more manageable and functional two-sided razor. King began marketing this "safety razor" with disposable blades. As hard as he tried, the first year he was only able to sell 51 razors. It was time for another idea. King began to give away the razors and then sold replacement blades with ample profit margin. The "loss leader" concept was born. By 1915, Gillette produced 450,000 razors and sold over 70 million blades. When World War I began in 1918, the Gillette Safety Razor Company provided every American soldier a field razor set paid for by the U.S. Government.

The Bottom Line

Creativity is the essence of successful marketing. Creativity is a combination of deliberate idea generation, persistence and serendipity. Financial services organizations are increasingly dependent on creative marketing ideas to create visibility and competitive differentiation in a cluttered marketplace. Cultivating a well defined and disciplined process for creativity is no longer a marketing option; it is a requirement.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 9:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.