Creativity is no black art

December 2009

Creative thinking is something that anyone can learn, not something you’re born with. Here are some simple things you can try to help you find new ideas for anything from building relationships to differentiating your brands...

Know what you want to achieve

In order to succeed, creative thinking has to be part of a planned process, using different techniques to get new ideas to flow freely.

And if you want your ideas to be useful, and not just wild and imaginative, it helps if you start with a problem in mind, so that your thinking revolves around a central theme.

Open your mind

Once you’ve started brainstorming, don’t let anything hold you back. There’s no such thing as a bad idea – just open your mind, see what comes out, and keep it coming.

There are a number of ways to approach whatever problem you’re trying to solve. A good starting point is to check if your marketing research triggers any creative ideas. Look at what your customers and competitors are doing, for instance – that might help you to identify some new opportunities.

One of our favourite techniques is to dream up ‘ideas to get us fired’. Think about something completely wild and see if it leads you somewhere sensible. This can yield some great ideas, but you should think carefully about the ones you put forward to your boss!

Try brainstorming together with your colleagues as well as on your own. You are likely to generate even more ideas if you bounce ideas off each other, and sometimes you can see potential in other people’s ideas that they might not see themselves.

Develop your best ideas

When you have generated a big pool of raw ideas, it is time to pick the ones that might just work, and develop them further. See where they take you.

One thing you can try is looking at things from another perspective. If, say, you’re developing a new product, think about what your customers, partners or distributors might see in it. What features, benefits, value-add, sales channels, etc., are they interested in?

You can also take each of your ideas individually and decide whether you can adapt, distort, rearrange or exaggerate them somehow. See if you can find a different use for your idea, substitute part of it for something else, or combine two or more parts or your idea to create something new.

Write things down

You never know when inspiration will strike, so it’s good to record your ideas – regardless of how obscure they are. They may not be useful now, but at some point in the future they could be invaluable. So always have a notebook or voice recorder to hand.

If you want to talk through some ideas for your next campaign, please contact us.

 

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