Creative Strategy

Let the left and right part of the brain connect and you get a creative strategy! This was the first message of Steven Kostant’s (Fleishman-Hillard) presentation Tuesday night to my capstone class at Georgetown University. Everyone needs a creative strategy to survive “the experience economy” and the highly disruptive world we live in.

 

But how do you do it? How do you create a creative strategy? It is all about the process. Kostant mentioned the art and joy of collaboration between people with different backgrounds, research, and brainstorm as essential parts of a (design or innovative) process. All of this is of course not surprising. But he offered advice about how to do it:

 

-         uncover deep audience insights

-         sometimes it is interesting to observe/analyze an audience who is not relevant at all to your product/policy

-         focus groups are cheap but you cannot tell people what they need…..

-         digital ethnography (observe your audience and put a video together or make a collage of pictures and watch it and use the knowledge in creating a strategy)

 

We also watched the old ABC Nightline show, The Deep Dive, about IDEO, the product design company in Palo Alto which among other things designed the first mouse for Apple.

I found a version of the show on YouTube. Watch it if you are about to design a process. To me it does not matter whether you are designing a shopping chart (as they do in this case) or a new communications strategy.

 

 

 

My take away:

-         include people in your project group who does not necessary listen to you, but try out things and asks for forgiveness

-         Set a deadline and drive accountability

-         Be careful to bring in the devil’s advocate too early