Imagination, creativity, knowledge and Marketing

What is creativity? Is it more imagination or innovation born from knowledge?

Creativity is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. It's used to describe everything from art and design to how we solve problems. But what exactly is creativity? While there are many definitions, I think the most accurate comes from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In his book "Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention" he describes it as combining knowledge with imagination in order to create something new.

Innovation has been defined as applying ideas or methods so that they bring about an advance in technology or society, which means it can be done without being creative according to this definition.

However, when you take into account Albert Einstein's famously words, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” it all starts to click.

“Knowldge” is the theoritical and practical understanding of a subject. “Creativity” is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something.

Now, let's take a closer look at each quality and discuss how they're connected in marketing.

Historically, the term “Creativity in marketing has been associated with the words and pictures that go into ad campaigns. But marketing, like other business functions, has become more complex and rigorous. Marketers need to master data analytics, customer experience, and product design. Do these changing roles require a new way of thinking about creativity in marketing?

How creativity is used in today’s competitive business world?

In a nutshell, creativity in marketing involves the generation and execution of unique ideas that communicate a message in an original way that helps you to achieve a measurable business goal.

Creativity also can be the secret weapon that allows a company to outsmart, rather than outspend, the competition.

Amazon, used creativity to market their voice assistant product - Alexa. You've probably seen the commercial. Alexa “loses” her voice. In her place, Amazon begins to employ celebrities to fill in for Alexa’s voice. The result is a commercial that had much more recall and recognition in a large field of expensive Super Bowl commercials. Instead of a simple demonstration of the product, Amazon was able to demonstrate the product using celebrities voices which made the ad much more memorable.

Another great example is Spotify's Wrapped campaign. The fact that Spotify was able to essentially make a holiday out of this and make it this big of a yearly trend is a pure brillience to me.

Although I feel like they're pushing super hard this year to build the anticipation, (I've seen countless ads about how "Wrapped is coming") this is genius idea to use the data they already have in a way that allows their users to share their music (and personality by extension) while gaining free exposure.

Show people interesting stats that delight them. Give them a reason to share their good taste in music with their friends. By this they also give bands and artists a reason to share their success with their fans.

Everybody who sees a post like this and uses Spotify thinks "Hey, I could post too, my taste in music is also cool and everybody needs to know" ;)

It's quite simple, but if you distill this down to the hard facts, there are some great lessons to learn from this.

As Steve Jobs said any new idea is nothing more than a new combination of old elements. He said the ability to make those new combinations depends on our ability to see relationships. That’s what makes some people more creative. They are better at spotting those connections, better at recognising possible relationships. They are able to do this because they’ve had more experiences, or thought more about those experiences, than other people. They are better at connecting the dots because they have more dots to connect.

Steve said that this was the problem in the ‘creative’ industries. Most people haven’t had diverse experiences. They may know a lot, but only about a very narrow field. So they don’t have enough dots to connect. And so they end up with predictable, linear solutions.

One of the best advertising people of all time was Carl Ally. He said the true creative person wants to be a know-it-all. They want to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, modern manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and lean hog futures. Because they never know when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road, but they know it will happen.

In conclusion, I want to say that creativity is the process of putting together already available information in a new way, which leads to solving problems that have not been solved before.

It’s about taking an idea and looking at it from different angles until you find something that works for you or your company.

In this article I have given you some great examples on how creativity can be used in marketing strategies by considering consumer research data to come up with creative ideas. These are just two ways you might use creativity to help grow your business--but there are many more out there! What creative idead have you used in your marketing? I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.