Follow us on Twitter There is a new post on the Brandmaster blog, that discusses the issues of ‘concept branding’ and ‘concept marketing’. This impacts upon all aspects of creativity and innovation in business, marketing and communications. In essence, the creative process starts in a ‘glass box’, where all the background, research, analysis and planning is visible to all – it then passes briefly into the ‘black box’ where the fruits of this evaluation can be interpreted into something memorable, pedestrian or poor. Then it passes back into the glass box where the testing analysis and application process is visible and empirically understandable.
The key argument is that ideas do not spring from the ether. They are the product of pragmatic background processing. Sometimes this process is not formal, but part of the normal practice of the organisation. This in no way belittles the critical importance of brilliant creative minds who make the difference between great solutions and the mundane – but the best creatives are quick to acknowledge the importance of skilled planning.
There is a sound reason why we provide specific mentoring and coaching for owners and managers of creative businesses – that is because they are different.
The majority of creative based businesses are owned or controlled by the people who founded them, and these are creative people. Far from being ‘head in the clouds’, these people are extremely well qualified to run and grow businesses.
- Starting and building a business is a creative process in itself.
- One of the skills that many non-creative based companies invest in is innovation and creativity – skills which are the stock in trade for these businesses.
- These same levels of thought and approaches are applicable to all the business disciplines.
It is not that creative people need to learn new business disciplines to handle what some see as the essential, down-to-earth skills: what they need to do is to learn how to apply their own skills and innovative thought processes to the wider business disciplines. For these people training is not the right solution. If it can be argued there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for business growth and development, this is doubly true for creative businesses.
Problems tend to occur with growth, when businesses replace entrepreneurial flair with accountancy expertise – while such skills are vitally important in business there is no reason why the hand on the tiller should not be a creative one
We advocate coaching and mentoring as the most efficient development route for creative businesses, where those valuable talents and energies can be directed in their own distinctive direction.
In creative based businesses there is tremendous intellectual and emotional energy – properly directed it can achieve miracles: wrongly focused it can be unwittingly destructive.
Please get in touch if you would like to learn more about creative business mentoring and coaching – we understand both business and creativity – it is what we do.
In today’s climate of rationalisation, measurable results, ROI calculations and the rest, it is too easy to overlook the emotional dimension of communications. But it is our emotional responses that create memorable experiences. If you were asked to note your top 5 brands, favourite ads, most interesting websites etc. it would be those that stirred excitement, laughter, pleasure or moved your spirit in some way.
It is too easy to overlook the two ends of the communications channel – the people. People buy from people and are engaged by the same things - whether this is in the consumer or the b2b sector.
We’ve just been looking at the emotional dimensions of brands – check out the post on http://bit.ly/cIQrEq.
An issue I often come across when helping creative companies market themselves is actually coming to terms with why people buy from them. Almost without exception they say, ‘The quality of our creative work’. Well sure, that is almost a given but that just leads you into a beauty contest, and leaves you at the mercy of client subjectivity.
A quick customer satisfaction survey often brings surprising (to the company) results. I recently carried out such a survey and the reason clients quoted was quality of customer service – a small victory for ‘the suits’. A similar survey for a successful web development company looking to international markets cited, ‘Responsiveness and human contact’ – it seems digital companies in general are quite poor at responding promptly – or picking up the phone.
There is a lesson here for many businesses, not just creative ones. There is a natural tendency to focus on the quality of your product or service and believe it is the best in the world. But your actual proposition is a combination of a number of factors which may include, quality, price, speed of delivery, customer service, responsiveness, pro-activity. It is how you manipulate the combination of these things that allows you to differentiate yourself from the competition with a unique offer.
New year is always a time for predictions and I’ve been looking through the crop on various blogs and in trade magazines, and, not to be outdone, here are the three things that ring bells for me.
Visual internet
The web will continue to get more and more visual. Sure, it will still be a text based medium at heart, but but more broadband has brought us more images, animations, Flash and of course video (okay, for ‘visual’ read ‘audio visual’). The boundaries of possibilities for marketers are expanding with increasing rapidity. The facebook/youtube generation is driving communications and conversations.
While we live in very exciting times I do have some worries, with my accessibility hat on, as we move away from text and hope everyone keeps in mind users with disabilities.
Mobile
There is little doubt that mobile is going to be very big in 2010, as it has been threatening for some time, but in what shape we still have to wait and see. It is a slippery concept – just when you think you have got your hand on it it moves on. Undoubtedly mobile apps fuelled by the iPhone and Google are driving one end with social internet revving up the other. Watch out for more mobile blogging.
Electronic PR
ePR has been galloping away in a quiet revolution and has already become a powerful and cost effective tool. Those who thought of it as just an electronic delivery system have had to think again. Social internet is still a bit of a wild child, but the borders between Web 2.0, online publishing, PR and web-promotion are becoming increasingly blurred and I suggest that in 2010 we will see agencies emerging offering a radically new type of service. While budgets continue to be squeezed, savvy communicators will be looking to ePR.
We have added two whitepapers on branding from the Brandmaster blog. Check them out – follow the whitepapers link.
A training course for businesses wanting to make their brands punch hard in the global arena.
We have a new course covering the key aspects of international branding.
The course was created in response to a demand from many companies on export training courses who had questions about brands and branding development. So, this one-day course was developed to answer some of those questions and also to address some wider issues in terms of brands and branding, such as clarifying international offers, language and cultural issues and protecting IPR.