Paths to Creativity – The Social Approach
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.
