Archive for March, 2010
By Paul Dumouchelle, Management Consultant, ADVISA
Creativity is at the core of marketing. The act of defining an offering to an identified market segment through a well-crafted message should involve new thinking every step of way. To foster such creativity it helps to understand the different approaches people take to the challenge, the “Perfectionist” is one of these.
Perfectionists’ creativity centers on a drive to define an “ideal” solution that meets objective criteria for excellence. They never rest until all the details are identified, arranged and polished. Masters of adaptation, they will take ideas proven to work in one arena and transfer them to the current challenge. Digging into available data, understanding all the nuances of the scenario and crafting an approach most-likely to succeed is their specialty.
Perfectionists are cautious and really hate mistakes. If your challenge involves a truly “new-to-the-world” situation in which no precedent or standard of excellence exists, a perfectionist may be stymied due to this aversion to risky recommendations. In today’s world of instant access to information, however, there are very few marketing challenges where a perfectionist cannot access a model or a case study that will inform their approach and lead to productive results.
One of my clients had a perfectionist creative director and she found his work quite “edgy” and she was surprised when I described risk aversion as a common trait of such people. I encouraged her to ask him about the inspiration for his ideas the next time he presented a concept that struck her as new and bold. She explained that her approach to creativity included ongoing research about winning ideas from advertising competition around the world. Her innovation was to adapt an idea from this research to the challenge at hand – resulting in a creative approach that was new, fresh and exciting in the eyes of my client, and the market in question.
Managing them can be difficult at times because perfectionists have a tendency to be stubborn – after all, once you’ve crafted the “perfect” recommendation how can it be improved? Any change from perfect can only make it less perfect!
Perfectionists are especially valuable contributors to any group effort where you need someone grounded in facts and details to provide perspective and input in problem-solving and plan implementation.
Knowing your own approach to creativity and those of people on your team provides valuable leverage for maximizing the impact of your marketing efforts.
By Paul Dumouchelle, Management Consultant, ADVISA
Creativity is at the core of marketing. The act of defining an offering to an identified market segment through a well-crafted message should involve new thinking every step o f way. To foster such creativity it helps to understand the different approaches people take to the challenge, the “Social Approach” is one of these.
People who take the Social Approach to creativity have a special advantage in that their strength – building connections with other people – is the heart and soul any sales effort that involves emotions and feelings. If your creativity challenge can be addressed through any form of collaborative approach that involves many people or folks of diverse backgrounds, then the skills involved in the Social Approach to creativity will be valuable. These skills include empathy, listening, trusting, persuasion and, when combined with other personality traits can even expand into enthusiasm and excitement.
Optimism infuses our social creatives because they crave positive responses from others and we all know you get more flies with honey than vinegar. This outward focus on response means they will always have the audience in mind for their ideas. This can cause a limitation, of sorts, in that unusually outrageous or controversial ideas may never be pursued due to this concern for acceptance.
Creativity that relies on the Social Approach is especially well-suited for marketing challenges involving intangibles such as services, concepts or even politics. The tendency to “talk in pictures” or with stories helps to evoke the feelings and images necessary in such challenges.
Managing them can be difficult at times because they are always “playing to the crowd” and you need to understand what that crowd is to understand what is important to them. Asking them, “how do you want to be seen around here” can be a useful entrée into a meaningful discussion on how best to lead them.
This same crowd-pleasing attitude also means they are especially well-suited to team-oriented efforts. They are natural facilitators of discussions and if you need to get the best from everybody in your creative efforts if won’t hurt to have a person who takes the Social Approach leading the way.
Knowing your own approach and those of people on your team provides valuable leverage for maximizing the impact of your marketing efforts.
By Paul Dumouchelle, Management Consultant, ADVISA
Creativity is at the core of marketing. The act of defining an offering to an identified market segment through a well-crafted message should involve new thinking every step of the way. To foster such creativity it helps to understand the different approaches people take to the challenge, the “Analytical Approach” is one of these.
The Analytical Approach relies on logic and separating or reducing elements to their most basic level. This is a problem-solving mindset which looks at the various factors involved in a marketing challenge as pieces of a puzzle with the focus then being on figuring out the one best way all the pieces fit together.
One dimension that is shortchanged in this approach is that of emotion and feelings. If you’re in a market segment where emotions are critical to success, either in the product/service itself or in the communication content, then you will want to complement your Analytical creativity with approaches that tap into the world of emotions.
Creativity that relies on the Analytical Approach is especially well-suited for strategic challenges such as new product development, repositioning and segmentation. People employing the Analytical Approach will often prefer to work alone or at least have clear “ownership” of their turf regarding the business.
Managing them can be difficult at times because they have such strong confidence in the value of their own ideas that they discount the contributions of others. They believe their own ideas are best so when trying to direct them in a particular way you are well-served to frame the discussion in such a way that they will come to your point of view on their own.
This same stubborn belief in their own ideas also means they are especially well suited to pursue entirely new areas and create “new to the world” concepts. As you can guess, many entrepreneurs come from the ranks of people employing the Analytical Approach to creativity.
Knowing your own approach and those of people on your team provides valuable leverage for maximizing the impact of your marketing efforts.
Andrea L. Crabtree MS
Tragedy highlighted much of the celebrity world in recent weeks with the passing of former teenage stars. Happily, a very different kind of story emerged in the past few days to provide fodder for water cooler chats across the country.
Lindsay Lohan is suing the E-Trade folks over one of their baby commercials and she is asking for a cool $100 million dollars in damages.
If you do not already know about the lawsuit, you might remember the boyfriend-stealing/milkaholic baby named Lindsay from one of the many baby-themed E-Trade commercials. Lohan’s attorney asserts that her client is recognized on a one-name basis like Oprah or Madonna and, thus, the lawsuit.
Really, it does not even matter if you remember the commercials or even if you agree with my friends and me that the lawsuit is ludicrous. (We all agree that, in all the times we have viewed the commercial, we never once thought of Lindsay Lohan.) There are two important marketing side notes to this story.
E-Trade is probably overjoyed with the free publicity (lawsuit notwithstanding) and Lindsay Lohan believes she has branded herself so thoroughly that she has joined the ranks of Oprah, Madonna and Elvis.
Only in Hollywood.
(Or a New York courtroom.)
By Paul Dumouchelle, Management Consultant, ADVISA
As highlighted in this NPR article, increased fuel costs, demands for improved work-life balance and technology advancements all support more people doing their work from their home.
Two key reasons this is of special importance to the marketing community. First of all, many of us are “knowledge workers” – in that what we do involves information, graphics or communications – all of which can be digitized and managed as well from one’s home office as from anyplace else. Also, as marketers, we need to be aware of all such trends. There are marketing opportunities in the “telecommuter” segment, either by bundling business services in a new way that appeals to the telecommuter segment or in yet-to-be-defined innovative products, services or campaigns.
One promising aspect of this trend is the incredible productivity boost it can create. For the employee it comes from eliminating the time and cost of transporting yourself from your residence to your place of work. On any given day this probably adds at least an hour of discretionary time for most people. It is certainly something I value in my own “work from home” environment.
The employers’ side of the equation includes reduced expenses for facilities to make room for the employee.
Of course telecommuting won’t work in all situations and for all people. It takes a certain type of person to manage the independence inherent in telecommuting. If you’re looking for hierarchy and structure you won’t find it working from home. While the NPR article also mentions a need for personal interaction, I think this “need” will be increasingly fulfilled by interactive technology as time goes on and in fact it may be easier to connect with people via a network than face-to-face in a workplace. Anybody who has ever scrambled for a meeting room at the last minute can relate to that!
People who grow up texting and on Facebook will collaborate in different ways than older generations, for sure.
