CREATIVE THINKING: HARD TO DO, HARDER TO SELL. April 9, 2008
Posted by brainactivist in How to sell creative ideas.Tags: selling creative ideas
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Companies often request creative “out of the box” thinking, even more recently since the value of has become more recognized and accepted. (Remember in the report about what allowed September 11th to happen, a failure of imagination was one of the top reasons…that’s powerful!).
Selling creative thinking it is another story. If you think it’s a challenge to think truly creatively, wait until you try to convince your boss to take the idea and run with it. I think the reason for this is that a creative solution is by nature one that is different. That means it’s untested. And business and government love something that tests well. Just look at how companies develop products and how politicians run campaigns. They poll.
There are a couple of ways to try to get your groundbreaking idea to see the light of day. You can present your idea in business terms i.e. show backup (and there’s a lot today) about the rewards (ideally financial) of creative thinking. I’ll post more on this later with many examples. And you can try not to use “soft” terms like branding or other intangibles and focus more on the valuations senior people look for.
The first step, though, is don’t think that just because we were asked to do something truly different it will be easily embraced. Your toughest job is to get your brainstorm implemented.
(Please share tactics you’ve used to sell new ideas)
The hardest frustration for me to overcome in my workplace is when my boss asks for new and varied ideas, which we then go off and work hard at developing, and invariably he resorts back to the “safe” methods that have been tested and proven to be okay but not outstanding. This is despite that fact that we have come up with some really good proposals that we know will not only work but will blow those stale tried and tested methods out of the water. It’s true that when it comes to the bottom line then you really have to get creative about how you sell your creative ideas.
I recently read a book called Jack’s Notebook by Gregg Fraley, about a guy (Jack) who works a series of dead end jobs and can’t think his way out of the way his life has become.
This would be the perfect book to have everyone on an innovation team read. Actually, maybe any kind of team that has to deal with complex situations that require creative thinking.
I’ll check out the book. Thanks.
I think your situation and frustration is so commonplace. I have a feeling that may change soon as upper management starts to see some very big companies promoting the value of creativity. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
I’ll be posting some of the “business case” stuff to help sell new ideas and hope you’ll forward this blog on to colleagues who might benefit.
Jann
hello i have some creative ideas about motivation of employes
and my organization is in favour of creative ideas so i want to know that which medium will be better to express my ideas i shuld write some article or do smthing else
Does anyone know how I might sell a creative idea for to a Gof Ball manufacturer? They have a agency for 60 years. Do I pitch it to the agency? What would they pay 100K plus 1% of the media spent?
You’d have to get to the marketing director of the company. 1) that’s not easy to do, and 2) an idea must fit into their strategy, and you probably don’t know what that is. (See my post: LAY A SOLID FOUNDATION). I wouldn’t be too hopeful if I were you. I think there should be a site where people can post their great ideas and corporations can shop for them, but that would be hard to pull off, which is why I never did it!