Tag Archives: Creativity
Ideopia Showcases B2B Marketing Work
A new b2b mini site from Ideopia showcases business-to-business marketing for clients in the medical equipment, industrial manufacturing, private aviation, business newspaper and restaurant categories. Ideopia’s philosophy as a B2B agency is to emphasize creative work that make complex to commodity products interesting and entertaining to prospects. The projects highlighted on the site include a web design for Hamilton Caster, an ad campaign that helped a business newspaper eliminate its competition, and a branding campaign that injected new life into a mature product.
The site also gives prospective clients a peek at Ideopia’s broad tactical capabilities, which include web site design, public relations, social media, advertising and web marketing.
Ideopia’s b2b accomplishments include 19 years of successive growth for a medical equipment manufacturer; a 40-fold increase in sales for a national computer hardware distributor; and sales and market share growth for clients through two recessions.
More information about Ideopia/B2B is available from new business director, Mike Bober, at 513-947-1444.
Head Banging: Listen to Your Characters
In Stephen King’s “On Writing,” the novelist compares writers who map out the plot points of their books to those who observe and follow their characters. Plot points lead to more predictable results, King observes. But breakthroughs happen when you follow your characters or ideas.
This is a common problem for planners and creative alike. We pressure ourselves to develop strategies based on data and insights. But creative brilliance or abject failure comes from following ideas and their development. The solution is the willingness to set strategy aside, and be willing to fail over and over before you succeed. And that’s a test of real character.
Steal This: Find Creative Ideas with Spezify
Real time search engines are multiplying like rabbits — Collecta, Topsy, CrowdEye, TweetMeme, OneRiot, Yauba. Never fear, we have a favorite from the crowd. It’s called Spezify.com. Type your search term into Spezify, and it will return a melange of related images, posts and news items pulled from Twitter, other real-time media and the web. The search results look like a random display of notes and pictures. Click on key terms to branch out into new topics. Works kind of like your brain. Looks like your messy – I mean “our” messy – desks. It’s a great creative tool.
Head Banging: The Availability Bias and Creativity
Back in the good old T-Rex days, our reptilian brains were trained to react to the biggest boom. After all, thumping away from the most vivid threat, say an erupting volcano, was just good survival sense. Millions of years later, our brains still have this cognitive programming. It causes us to remember and react to whatever most strongly stands out from the background noise, and rapidly forget stimuli that don’t. For example, a beautiful waterfall with motorized nymphs in the lobby of your lawyer’s office may give you a more positive impression of his legal skills than his win/loss record warrants. So what’s this mean to you? If your marketing doesn’t stick out, your terrific product could just fade away in the memories of your potential customers.
Head Banging: Fear is Good.
The light bulb, the very icon of innovation, was invented during a recession. And as its inventor, Thomas Edison, claimed, it was a more a product of sweat and hard work than genius. Search for “innovation and recession” and you’ll find hundreds of other examples. The barrier to profitable new products and ways of work is usually not talent or money, or kumbaya techniques for brainstorming and creating culture- friendy idea incubators for workers. It’s motivation. For some it’s intellectual curiosity, a personal burning desire for knowledge, but it’s sure hard to beat a hot injection of fear, the threat to survival, or $4 gasoline. So use your fear license to act boldly and swiftly; to make the tough decisions; create inspired, timely solutions; and get back to our cushy jobs as soon as possible.