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)
