Why you should cultivate culture of creativity for your brand

Everyone wants to be creative, the question is, is everyone ready to go through the process? In today’s modern world where brands are in search of fertile ideas to grow up their business it requires strategic thinking and positioning in such a way it fosters powerful and transformational ideas. Moreover, to compete and survive in business, brands need to develop new ideas that will add more value to their services and products, some may even suggest you go beyond customer expectations. To be more precise, today’s consumers are more driven by ‘emotional touch’ than price or product oriented. Nike’s ‘Why You Should Be (Just) Doing it Too’ marketing strategy is one of the best examples of brands that plugged new ads which resonate with customer affinities. So, what or where do you begin?

Creativity begins with being curious about a certain well-framed problem. It is the best and first energy of innovation. It opens our brain to different ideas, perspective and builds a solid learning behavior towards the unknown.

Bill Burnett, prof. of mechanical engineering & the executive director of the design program at Stanford suggests as a principle of creativity, you have to go beyond analytic intelligence (IQ) to emotional intelligence (EQ) powered by your kinetic intelligence that harnesses more knowledge from your body and mind. To make IQ & EQ work you need to practice improv games as written by Patricia Ryan Madison in her book entitled: “improv wisdom, Don’t Prepare Just Show Up”. She points out games that improvise your ideation such as; sound ball, proverbs, point, and shout etc. Sounds silly huh!? The main emphasis here is to loosen the brain, to get it out of stretching mode to being creative.

The other thing is space. Nothing really works out in the wrong environment. To activate ideas, you need to have a ‘Raw Space’, an idea room which is visible and persistent to your brainstorming whereby you can see every piece of an idea on Raw space which omits ‘status clues’ or hierarchy and make the space friendlier to work in.

Ideation for solutions is an integral part to come up with creative ideas. If you can train yourself to get stuck in your own thinking, your brain will respond by lowering that fear. It activates your conceptual box and demonstrates how your brain utilizes rules when solving a problem. Such rules include: deferring judgment, going for volume of ideas which absorbs even the wildest ones, and most importantly building on ideas of others. Always remember, looking for new ways of solving existing problems will push you to think of new alternative or solutions to the problem.

Creativity will demand you to look at the world differently in a more visual and tactical way. You need to build more empathy (social awareness), develop an attitude to learning new things and lower your fear of failure.

You are now halfway towards constructing great ideas for your next campaign. Hey, look! You are probably thinking of it right now.