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Five Tips to Make Your Marketing More Creative

By Michele Pariza Wacek

Same old same old just doesn’t sell anymore. To make your marketing stand out, you need to get creative. Below are five tips designed to get your creative juices flowing. Some are brainteasers or are what Michael Michalko in “Thinkertoys” calls Linear Thinkertoys. Others fall under intuition or Intuitive Thinkertoys.

Some tips may appeal to you more than others. My suggestion is to try them all. Even the ones you’re not drawn to may still open some doors that wouldn’t have opened any other way.

These tips will work whether you sell a product, a service or both.

1. Find the “second right answer.” Roger von Oech talks about this in A Whack on the Side of the Head. Don’t be content with the first good idea you come up with. Take the time to think of a second, or third or 50th idea. Quantity counts - the more ideas you have to choose from, the more likely you’ll discover an excellent or even a brilliant one. Remember, Thomas Edison discovered thousands of ways a light bulb didn’t work.

2. Change the question. If you change the question, you’re probably going to get a different answer. You say you want to sell more products? What if you changed the question to how can you make more money? Well, there are other ways to make more money than to sell more products - maybe you lower the cost of making the product or you raise the price of the product. Now you suddenly have new avenues to explore rather than just going down the same tired path.

3. Ask your product or service how it wants to be sold. Now we move into more intuitive techniques. Start by getting yourself into a relaxed state. Take a few deep breaths or practice some relaxation techniques. Imagine your product or service in front of you. Now ask it questions. Who do you want to be sold to? How do you want to be sold? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Who do you think you can help? Why do you want to help them? You can also do this technique as a journal exercise. Write down the question and answer. See what bubbles up onto the paper.

4. Paint a public relations campaign. What would a press release look like if you painted it? Or sculpted it? How about a dance number? A collage? Take any part of your marketing that troubles you and turn it into a piece of art. By combining two dissimilar acts, you may discover your answer. Or you may not come up with anything at all, but just the act of “playing” and “creating” could jolt something loose. Hours or days later your idea may suddenly end up in your lap.

5. Walk away from it. If nothing is working, then stop. You can literally walk away by taking a walk, or just quit thinking about it. This is especially important if you find yourself getting frustrated or discouraged. Give your subconscious time to mull things over. The idea may just suddenly appear to you. Or, after a few days, try another exercise or two. That may be the catalyst you need.

The most important tip of all? Make sure you have a blast. Being creative should be fun. Keep it light and fun, don’t struggle too hard with it, and see how many ideas you’re rewarded with.

Michele Pariza Wacek owns Creative Concepts and Copywriting, a writing, marketing and creativity agency. She offers two free e-newsletters that help subscribers combine their creativity with hard-hitting marketing and copywriting principles to become more successful at attracting new clients, selling products and services and boosting business. She can be reached at http://www.writingusa.com.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A BAD IDEA

If you are serious about creativity and innovation, whether for yourself or your organisation, there is one basic principle you should accept: there is no such thing as a bad idea. There are, of course, ideas which you should not implement in their present form. They may seem like bad ideas to the uninitiated. They are not. They are simply ideas need further development. Such ideas in their original form may...
• be incomplete
• not solve the problem adequately
• be unclear as stated
• be morally, ethically or legally wrong
• be unsuitable for the present time, perhaps because

they involve a new, untested technology.

Let's call such ideas “premature ideas”. With a bit of work, many of them can be transformed into good, implementable ideas. When an employee or colleague comes to you with a premature idea, follow these three steps...

1. THINK about the idea for a moment. It's easy to reject an idea immediately because it sounds crazy. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's brilliant. Alternatively, it may simply be a premature idea. One thing you can be sure of: it's not a bad idea. Bad ideas do not exist.

2. COMPLIMENT the positive aspect or aspects of the idea. Every idea has something positive going for it. Find that positive aspect and highlight it.

3. CHALLENGE the idea owner to improve the idea. To do this, simply turn your concern about the idea into a question that poses a creative challenge. Such questions typically begin with “How [else] could you/we..?” or “How [else] might you/we..?” As a rather extreme example, imagine an overly enthusiastic
young marketing executive comes to you and says: “With their new product, the competition our outselling us by two to one. I think we should blow up their headquarters building. That will slow them down!”

Aside from making a mental note to have the a psychologist talk to the young executive about her destructive ideas, you should reply: “That's an interesting, if extreme, idea. I like the idea of slowing the competition down, but I am not sure I could condone such an approach. How else might we slow them down?”

Here you have complimented the idea's strong point, indicated a concern and have turned that concern into a challenge. Moreover, you have done some positive things for the marketing executive...
1. You have complimented her creativity and, as a result, have

encouraged her to continue being creative
2. You have indicated the positive and negative aspects of her idea
3. You have given her a new creative challenge and the motivation

to take on the challenge.

Unfortunately, most of us would be inclined to respond to the marketing executive's idea with a statement like:
“you must be crazy!” or “that's a terrible idea!” The result of such statements would be humiliation, discouragement and demotivation. Very likely
that marketing executive would learn to keep future ideas – at least her more creative ideas to herself. Worse, if her colleagues learn of the rejection, they will also learn to keep ideas to themselves.

As I stated, the example given is an extreme one. But even in less extreme situations, do not call a premature idea a bad idea. Instead...
• Think
• Compliment
• Challenge

You'll find this simple approach results in more ideas, more motivated staff and a higher degree of innovation.

This article is from the Jan 2006 edition of Report 103. It is a complimentary weekly electronic newsletter from Bwiti bvba of Belgium (a jpb.com company: http://www.jpb.com).
Archives and subscription information can be found at http://www.jpb.com/report103/
Report 103 is edited by Jeffrey Baumgartner and is published on the first and third Tuesday of every month.