Creativity Is Hard Work

People like to think of creativity as a bolt from the blue that suddenly opens up the heavens to a new insights or idea. While lots of great advances have come from these “Eureka!” moments, creativity in the marketing, and broader business, world is hard work. And with some discipline and hard work, a lot of people can tap into their own creativity.

I see this most often when businesses think about how to connect with customers. You can get lots of data and do great analysis to understand your customers’ decision journeys and identify real opportunities. But then you have to turn that insight into a practical, viable, idea.

Here are some tips:

• Get video. When you’re actually doing your research, especially if you’re doing qualitative research, film some of the people whom you’re talking to. Get quotes. Have them talk about what’s important to them and what’s not important to them. Actually see where they’ve been frustrated. Tap into the emotion side. Often ideation has to connect with somebody at an emotional level, and often the data doesn’t bring that out, but videos do.

• Think of a person. Creating personas whom you’re actually going to be focusing on is incredibly valuable, because it gives you someone to talk about with a bit of richness behind it.

• Look around. If you look around – not just at competitors but companies and people in completely different areas – you’ll likely uncover 40 to 50 great ideas of other cool things that are happening in the digital space. Put them on boards around the room. These make great fodder to stimulate ideas.

• Break your team up. Create different groups, each focused on one of the particular personas. Step back and say, “Okay, given what we’re seeing now in terms of that decision journey, what are the things we’ve got to change?”

• Whittle down the ideas. As you start to create a broader list of ideas, you’re going to need to whittle those down. A very simple way of sorting them out is to create a two-dimensional matrix, one dimension being feasibility and the other impact.

• Do additional legwork. Many times as you start to evaluate these ideas, you’ll need to get some more numbers and understand the scale, or actually do some analysis to establish potential cost.

• Get out of the office. You’ve got to get into the environment where people are and observe them. This is a really important way to establish real empathy with your customers. It makes an enormous difference in terms of developing a commitment to solve their issues.

One day we were with a client team, a senior group of marketers, to figure out how mobile could change the in-store shopping experience. These people went out onto the mall floor to see what people were doing as they shopped. These executives saw how some of the shoppers were taking pictures of objects and sharing that picture with others to solicit the opinions of their friends and family. The marketers also saw people looking up prices and looking up more information. And then they also went into some of these stores to understand the customer experience, e.g. how good the signage was and the explanation of the products were, whether the people who were working in the store knew enough to be really helpful, where mobile could actually help. A few them even asked some of the shoppers questions about their experience.

This “empathy outing” was incredibly helpful to the executive team. Not only did it spur ideas, it also got them out and understanding exactly what being a customer meant along his or her decision journey.

It might sound strange to some people, but being methodical about creativity is a great way to be creative.

What other tips and ideas have you seen successfully used to surface good ideas?

Learn more about our latest thinking on the Marketing & Sales site, and follow us on Twitter @McK_CMSOForum. And please follow me @davidedelman.

[Image: EuroMagic, Flickr]