There are a multitude of ways to define creativity, to define business leadership: to define the art of the possible in market making opportunities. Our century long business foundations define creativity in the language of hiring outside marketing, advertising and social networking creative agencies to study, learn and shoulder the relevancy of our brands and products into our target markets. Fast forward to today, we respect a new cradle of hyper-changing business realities across sales, marketing and business operations regardless of markets served. Our hyper-fast digital reality docents us to recognize, to realize that creativity must be a company-internal ambient muscle for our businesses: it must be the daily fuel and responsibility across each and every touch point of business to be creative, to unite creative assets into mature brand-and-product market making opportunities.
Think of it, our sales leaders are demanded to be highly creative and relevant to drive our products and brands without an outside “sales agency” to guide their strategies, to create their presentations, to create their brand and product positioning. Sales and marketing should in essence daily unite, congener forces with internal marketing to create, to mature, to outmuscle competitors through creativity, relevancy and united assets without external agencies. Our advertising agencies should be focused on executing our stated strategies, our internal creative mockups, our created and curated content, our channel deployments. Creativity, in my humble opinion should come from within, not from without.
Creativity’s cadence and relevant organizational leadership should always be designed to spark imagination and actionable stimulation. In essence, Albert Einstein was right: “creativity and imagination is more important than knowledge.” When creativity and relevancy unite across the enterprise a brand, a product can best unleash unfettered capacity, can best compete in the market. Home grown, business grown creative-gravitas and responsibility within and across each department, workgroup and enterprise is company essential. It is the new heartbeat of brand and product excellence, brand elasticity, brand infatuation. Those on the inside who have empirical knowledge, direct responsibility and passion to make or take a market must lead creative relevancy. It is internal cross-company business assets flexing their creative muscles that engages consumer/customer opportunity, denies competitive advantage, makes or takes a market efficiently, smartly.
As we can agree, creativity is at least as important as knowledge, let us define imagination in a simple yet aggressive formula. Let us express the power of imagination to capture consumer infatuation aggressively, assiduously every day:
Imagination = Creativity + Relevancy (in essence 1+1=WON)
If your sales and marketing team is void of united impactful creativity, your brand/product will never capture consumer/customer imagination. If your creativity does not warrant or capture relevancy than again you will miss the opportunity for capturing market imagination. And of course, if your offering is amiss of both break-thru creativity and consumer relevancy then your brand is clearly in the brand evaporation business. Simply stated, if you wish to make or take a market your sales and marketing team must unite seamlessly to capture imagination through ambient union of creativity and relevancy across each and every touch point right down to the last three feet of the sale.
For me personally, I am a student of creativity in my home life as well as my business life. I study creativity across the 64 squares of a chess board. Managing and planning relevant-creativity across a chess board, a moment in time where there are +-10,921,506 total possible positions after 7 moves takes practice; fierce imagination and steady knowledge. If you move your fingers from a chess board to the 88 keys of a piano and you are asked to compose a creative-relevant 5 minute Nocturne or Sonata imagine how many millions of permutations are available to garner a listeners imagination, to capture their infatuation. In business, we have a multitude of touch points all pining to release their relevant creativity under the wide ribs of your brand and products. These market making touch-point-brand-assets are in many cases harnessed or shackled in the back room. Exercising fingers and minds to include creative and relevant aspects of every department, especially uniting sales and marketing assets is just how markets are made, markets are taken.
I leave you with two examples of my own creative exercises at home across millions of possible keyboard permutations in hopes of capturing your imagination through creativity and relevancy. In this case the relevancy is graded on your like or dislike of the sounds, of the emotions, of the ability to capture your heart through these compositions. The first is a classical video rendering while the second is a progressive rock rendering. For the record, both were composed and performed in my Studio W on weekends where we all enjoy time for our personal creative and relevant family lives.
Wishing you accelerated selling and marketing results by capturing the emotional imagination of your target audience through uniting, maturing and deploying creativity and relevancy from inside and across all your company assets and touch points.
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