10 Ways to Boost Your Marketing Creativity

Every day, you face an onslaught of communication.

It's hard to stand out. And things become old fast.

It's hard to get people to stop and take notice.

To have a chance, you must constantly be creative in how you connect with your customers. You must capture their attention and then deliver something meaningful once you have it.

Over the years, I've lectured and run creativity workshops for companies like Zappos, Kohl's, and Scheels.

This week's newsletter features ten tips I've found effective for boosting ' creativity so you can get your customers to pay attention.

1. Take Effective Notes

Creative thinking comes from linking ideas that already exist in your memory in new ways.

The more you learn, the larger the pool of ideas you can access.

Attending talks and reading to increase knowledge is the first step, but you shouldn’t stop there. Break out a notebook and start taking notes.

Taking notes on a laptop is tempting because you type faster than you write. However, writing notes by hand increases retention. And retention — not note quantity — is the goal when it comes to creativity.

But there’s a more effective way to take notes than just jotting them down on a page:

• Open a new notebook and turn to the second page so you have a blank paper on each side. (You can use the first page as a table of contents.)

• On the right page, take down your notes.

• On the left page, take notes on your notes: write down anything your notes trigger in your memory.

By using this strategy, you actively create links between new and existing memories. You’ll build a matrix of ideas in your mind. You increase the connections between ideas.

And since you increase the number of connections, it will making it more likely that memories will be triggered to form creative solutions when you solve problems.

2. Cultivate Diverse Interests

Solutions to problems often come from places other than where the problems originated.

The idea for the magnetic power cord on Apple laptops came from someone observing a rice cooker. The click wheel on the original iPod wasn’t the idea of a designer but the idea of Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller.

The more areas you can draw knowledge from, the greater your chance of coming up with a creative solution.

You probably have some interest that you’ve been putting aside. That one you tell yourself you’ll get to someday.

Instead of putting it off, set aside some time each week to start learning.

Not only will you get personal satisfaction, but it can increase your creativity at work because it gives you more ideas to connect.

3. Clear Your Mind

You should always begin creative sessions with a clear mind.

You don’t want everything that came before it to weigh you down and distract your mind. If your mind is preoccupied, you will fixate on the past rather than open your ability to connect diverse ideas.

An easy way to clear your mind is through breathing exercises. Try these two exercises from Dr. Andrew Weil in sequence to start.

The Relaxing Breath

This breathing technique will clear your mind and put you at ease.

Start by pressing the tip of your tongue against the top of your mouth, right behind the front teeth.

Exhale through the mouth.

Then:

• Inhale for a count of four through the nose.

• Hold your breath for a count of seven.

• Exhale, making noise, for a count of eight through the mouth.

Repeat three times.

The Stimulating Breath:

You’ve cleared your mind. Now, it’s time to stimulate your mind for the creative work ahead.

Close your mouth.

Then:

• Rapidly inhale and exhale through your nose.

• Aim for about three breaths per second.

• Continue this for fifteen seconds.

4. Work in Bursts

Your mind can’t work nonstop and function at its optimum capacity.

Work in bursts rather than trying to work eight hours with only a lunch break.

These bursts shouldn’t be longer than 90 minutes, but blocks around 45 minutes are ideal.

A study using the DeskTime app found that the most productive employees took seventeen-minute breaks for every fifty-two minutes they worked.

When you take a break, get away from the computer. Walk around and stretch. Or do anything else to take your mind away from your work. And your eyes away from a screen.

When you stare at a screen you activate cells in your eyes that help you focus. But it requires your eyes to contort in a way that is tiring for long periods of time.

Staring at the horizon for just 5-10 minutes allows you to relax those cells, renewing your ability to focus when you come back.

5. Listen to Others

Listening to others is the key to making brainstorming more effective than working alone.

Not just hearing them (a passive process) but listening to them (an active process).

By listening, you have access not only to your knowledge base but also the knowledge bases of other group members. So, something they know that you don’t know may trigger something in your memory and lead to a creative solution.

To facilitate your ability to listen, you must come to the meeting with an open mind instead of coming to the meeting with a preconceived solution that you want to be heard.

Being attached to the ideas you had before the meeting will prevent you from taking advantage of your full creative power during the meeting.

And the idea you brought to the meeting may not be your best idea.

As the philosopher Émile Chartier noted, “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it’s the only one we have.”

6. Focus on Ideas Before Criticism

Idea generation and idea evaluation are different mindsets.

Switching constantly between them hinders your ability to generate your best work.

Start by solely generating ideas. Give yourself a time limit and try to create as many ideas as possible within that time (100 per hour is a good number). The creativity coach Tom Monahan calls this 100 mph thinking.

It doesn’t matter how crazy the ideas are. Write everything down.

Crazy ideas may produce practical ones.

Only after you have finished listing all of the ideas should you begin to evaluate them.

7. Make Creativity a Routine

Creative thinking can become a learned behavior.

But making it a learned behavior requires practice. As a result, you shouldn’t apply creative thinking occasionally—only when there are big problems to solve. Instead, set aside time at least once a week to tackle a current problem.

It can be small or large. The important thing is to do it regularly.

If you don’t develop a solution in your regular practice, that’s all right. You’re training yourself to be able to do it in the long run.

Professional writers take this approach: They might not write prolific prose every day. But sitting down and writing every day is essential to set them up for success.

8. Set Constraints

It’s counterintuitive to think that setting constraints enhances creativity, but that is what happens.

Without constraints, people default to solutions that have already worked. And when this occurs, truly creative solutions will be rare, and game-changing ones will likely be nonexistent.

As former advertiser-turned-psychologist Patricia D. Stokes observes, “The creativity problem is strategic and structural. It involves selecting (the strategy part) paired constraints (the structure part) that preclude reliable, successful responses and promote novel, surprising ones.”

When you set out to tackle a problem, look at what’s already in place. Then, create constraints that will force you to eliminate what worked in the past.

9. Activate the Child’s Mind

In exploring how to get the most out of group collaboration, creativity researcher Keith Sawyer noticed that when children construct games, they behave very differently than adults.

Adults spend a lot of time setting rules before they begin and then try and stick to them.

Children set a few rules and then jump into playing. New rules emerge, and some rules are discarded throughout the course of play.

With adults, everything is set before, but with children, the final product slowly takes form organically through experimentation.

Author Kevin Carroll sums up how children behave: “We voluntarily tested ourselves and accepted failure as a part of play. We ran, stumbled, and got up to run again … When something did not pan out as intended, we came up with a new solution until we were satisfied.”

Not only is this a better way for children to work, but it’s also better for adults.

In studying product innovation, professors Kathleen M. Einsenhardt and Behnam N. Tabrizi discovered that “extensive planning wastes time … It may be faster to probe, test, iterate, and experience than to plan.”

The best way to activate the child’s mind is to engage in play.

A simple game I use in my creativity workshop is having everyone stand and start passing an invisible ball. After the ball makes a few rounds, have people start tossing the ball. Then, add more balls.

This game has the added benefit of priming people to work together in subsequent, more practical exercises during the workshop.

Activating this play mindset activates the same mindset as creative thinking.

In the words of Carl Jung, “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.”

10. Don’t Rush to a Solution

Don’t force a solution to come out of one creative session.

Great ideas often come from multiple sessions.

After finishing a creative session, set aside the work for a few days (weekends are great for this).

The mind will play with the ideas you generated even when you’re not thinking about them. You may even experience a sudden flash of insight when you do not actively think about the problem.

If you don’t have a flash of insight, return to the problem and generate more ideas. You’ll end up with a lot more than you would if you tried to solve everything in one session.

And, remember, the larger the quantity of ideas, the greater the quality.

P.S. Want to unleash your team's creativity and have your marketing captivate customers? Reply to this email and I’ll set up a call so we can chat about a training on creativity techniques to spark fresh ideas that leave competitors in the dust.