Organizing Creativity

To be creative requires a moment of insight or a flash of brilliance in order to create a marketing campaign that captures the customers’ hearts and minds and engages at a grand new height with the company. Sure, this does occur to some extent. For the Ninth Store team Stuck in the Muck was such an insight by Jody Kemp, an Ag salesman out of Southey, Saskatchewan. But to be fair, most of our marketing (SABEX Award winning no less) is quite structured, conservative, measured, weighed and continuously tweaked. Quite boring stuff, not the Mad Men moments individuals going into marketing might hope for.

Even Stuck in the Muck, once the idea latched on and the risk taken to embark on the journey, became a managed affair. So in marketing, does creativity equal success? Or does organized, evaluated effort, manically linked to measured results equal success?

I believe they are both needed but would argue if you serve up what customers want, helpful insightful information to make buying decisions, and have the basic infrastructure of marketing (good products, good price, good placement) in place, good promotion can only succeed.

Creating good promotion through today’s platforms does not need to be incredibly creative, it is more of a science (especially digital media), in which results are measured, evaluated and adjusted based on results.

So how are we organizing our creativity? Quite easily to be honest: our campaigns are matched to seasonal sales cycles, with each campaign anchored by a tradition outbound media piece – a direct mail catalogue (we produce 18 -24 a year total) for each division per campaign. As well, dependent upon the division, each campaign is sometimes doubly anchored with a tradeshow. These campaigns are not insightful moments of brilliance, they are mapped and broke into tasks and work breakdown structures with timelines, due dates and resources assigned. Various mediums are used: print ads, radio, TV, direct mail and digital media are utilized based on our evaluation of customer reach and past sales results for each division/medium.

So how do we manage our creativity? Our team is spread across multiple locations and multiple provinces, so we teleconference meetings (minimum weekly) and review projects together via a shared screen so all can view. We currently are transitioning from large mapped project boards plastered to two walls at head office in our marketing office (The Idea Room) to online project management software. This is a planned evolution of our management, which includes all outsourced external design human resources as well as internal stakeholders. We think it will work brilliantly.

So where is the creativity in all this boring organizing, project management, result measurement and evaluation? To be quite honest, it is scheduled and then evaluated. We do have intensive debates on storyboards and look and feel, and the creative goes through the hoops of evaluation and approval. To be fair to the importance of creative, if the pieces produced are not quality they do not work, regardless of how well you organize the campaign. So to determine quality (in my mind quality is just another word for effectiveness) we are trending towards more and more testing of our creative ideas, trying out our ideas in small markets or one bigger market before we cascade the idea across the organization. Some of the current campaign pieces are the result of several years of evolution. All this said, we do believe if you are not prepared to fail you cannot be innovative. However, we mitigate that failure obsessively (through the above tactics) and are very mindful that the other three Ps of marketing (product, price, placement) need to be solid before we unleash a powerful fourth (promotion).

Yet despite all these attempts to organize and manage creativity, I still drink whisky like Don Draper, and ideas come to me and all members of the team in the oddest of places and times, but our implementation of that creativity is not that creative at all.