Creativity

The Core of Your Marketing Strategy

By Silva Devarj and Shanoor Devarj

Creativity is the Holy Grail of the Marketing business. From where does creativity spring? Are you born creative? Or can creativity be learned?

WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

The dictionary defines it as ‘the use of the imagination to bring something into existence,’ We define creativity as doing something that has never before been done, producing results that are novel, useful, and understandable.

The main objective of creativity is to elicit a response. The goal of “breakthrough” creativity, or innovation, is not only to produce effective surprise, or “shock recognition,” but also a sense that an answer to a problem is a good one.

HOW DO WE “CREATE?”

The interesting question is how is it possible for the mind to create a concept it has never known, a new idea, image or structure? Behaviorists say we get ideas by manipulating words, shifting them around in our heads until we hit upon a new pattern. This suggests you need an incredibly rich storehouse of words and knowledge from which to draw in order to be truly creative.

The creative process was first studied by physicist Hermann Helmholtz at the end of the 19th Century. He said it proceeds through three stages:

SATURATION, or fact and information gathering until there is nothing more to know about the problem.

INCUBATION, a period of rest and relaxation during which, without conscious awareness, the materials in the mind are moved about and reorganized.

ILLUMINATION, the stage that is most perplexing and unscientific. “It just dawned on me...” or “It just came to me...” are the ways people describe it. Actually, it is the rolling and rolling of the subconscious mind during incubation that probably shapes the solution.

CAN CREATIVITY BE TAUGHT?

Arguments rage hot and heavy. Surely, all of us can learn disciplines that will help us focus on new approaches to old problems. But teaching true creativity is like trying to teach someone how to grow to six-feet tall. It is not a choice, it is a given characteristic. True creativity is innate and difficult to teach. Everyone is naturally somewhat creative. But some are born creative geniuses, where others have to work at being creative, and might never come close to being exceptional.

WHAT BLOCKS CREATIVITY?

Lack of self-confidence, fear of failure, overwhelming need for order, desire to follow past precedents, inability to “sell,” or communicate ideas, and strict adherence to Logic.

True creativity requires a willingness to contemplate absurdity. In the very least it means to chart a course through the unknown. It involves a high degree of risk, with no assurance of reward, a position from which most people shy away. That’s why it is difficult, but not impossible, to teach creativity. Learning creativity demands a psychological reorientation vastly different from proven, safe techniques. Most people cannot make the adjustment.

Remember, you are working with the finest piece of equipment in the world, the human mind, which according to Von Neumann has up to 280 quintillion bits of storage. Even if it can only retrieve one-tenth of one percent of what we learn in life, it would still mean that our active memories hold several billion times more information than a large contemporary computer.

With a little luck, we can rebut the words of Ecclesiastes:

‘...and there is no new thing under the sun.’

How untrue, Ecc!