Marketing = Creativity. Full stop

As a marketer, I hope you have been through the rollercoaster of launching a new campaign: defining a crisp brief for the agency, evaluating different creatives, selecting the most impactful go to market activities.  You want to get the heart of the buyer wants and needs, as decisions are primarily driven by personal, emotional motivations (see “The Value of Getting Personal in B2B Marketing”), while cognitive biases are preventing clients to make rational decisions.  Fighting the war for attention, how do you craft a compelling and differentiated message?  You listen and connect the dots, absorbing, analysing and elaborating thousands of facts, data, friendly (or not) opinions – continuously testing hypothesis and refining your vision.  You evaluate alternative solutions and then you make bold decisions, taking one road and disregarding intersections,  driving toward the objectives you want to deliver. 

As I learned, the experience I have described above, is what entails the creative process, which opens up the debate about what marketing stands for.  I am sure you all have been in one of these marketing events where panellists are smartly arguing about the art (it’s all about branding and creativity!) vs. the science (it’s all about data!) of marketing.  Well, I have been in these discussions too, and here I want to make making a case about creativity being at the core of the marketing profession. With a disclaimer about my latest nerdy addiction: neuroscience.

You all have heard about left brain and right brain.  Left brain is realistic, analytical, practical, organised, and logical, and the right brain is so darn creative, passionate, sensual, tasteful, colourful, vivid, and poetic.Unfortunately, it’s not so simple, and it does not work this way. 

Creativity does not involve a single brain region or single side of the brain.Instead, the entire creative process consists of many interacting cognitive processes, with different brain regions being recruited to handle the task.   Three distinct brain networks are key to the most creative thinking. 

The first one is the Default Networkis involved in constructing dynamic mental simulations based on personal past experiences such as used during remembering and thinking about the future.  This network is also involved in social cognition: when we are imagining what someone else is thinking and feeling, this brain network is active. It is the area of real empathy.  Then there is the Salience Network, that is constantly monitoring external events and internal stream of consciousness. We are talking about thousands of data, that are being filtered, prioritized, and then shared with other parts of the brain that are responsible to make split second decisions.  Last but not least, the Executive Attention Network is recruited when a task requires that the spotlight of attention is focused like a laser beam. This network is active when you're concentrating on a challenging lecture, or engaging in complex problem solving and reasoning that puts heavy demands on working memory.It’s the area of decision making, based on the outcome you want to achieve. 

Science has proven that creativity at its best is working when all these three networks are. So yes: creativity is the core element of the marketing profession. Being analytical is key within the creativity process. 

In IBM Marketing we have 3 guiding principles, the north stars guiding our work every day, in every single activity: being buyer centric, to start everything we do (from messaging to route design) with the client in mind; being data-driven, to support the decisions making process with facts, rather the gut feeling; being outcome focused, to be clear and deliberate about what we want to achieve, and relentlessly drive a meaningful impact on the business.  I love the way these principles nicely align align with the three brain networks working simultaneouslyin the creativity process.  And you can forget about any debate around the art or science of marketing.