2. Why tomorrow's best strategies will be built on creativity
2. Why tomorrow's best strategies will be built on creativity
All the evidence you need for bringing creativity into your work-life and life-life
Step into my time machine. We’re not going far.
Let’s go back 15 years. Imagine telling someone that, in the future, you’d have no qualms about stepping into a stranger’s car to get a ride anywhere you want in the city, or you’d travel the world and choose to stay in a stranger’s house over a traditional hotel – sometimes with that very stranger sleeping upstairs.
Now time-jump with me to the present day. The most successful bottled water company in the world sells water in cans that are purposefully meant to look like craft beer. One of the world’s largest outdoor apparel companies uses its homepage to promote climate change initiatives; its biggest competitor closes its stores on Black Friday to encourage people to go outside.
In tech, one of the biggest success stories of the past 20 years has a non-sequitur monkey as its mascot and ran podcast ads before people knew what podcasts were. Startups are creating Amazon Prime content. Fintech companies are running their own publishing houses.
Creative, offbeat, and original thinking is so much more than the occasional isn’t-that-precious Fast Company story buried beneath the real news.
Creative expression is the real news.
Companies are taking off like rocket ships because of creative thinking. Careers are made because of creative ideas.
“Creativity is just connecting things.”
~ Steve Jobs
Through this creative process of making connections, you typically end up forming something new and valuable. This is what creative companies are doing with their business strategies and marketing. This is the magic behind game-changing ideas. It’s as simple as connecting things to make something new.
And we find ourselves at a critical time – practically, cosmically, you name it – where creativity is more valuable than ever.
1 - The world is becoming more homogenous.
Yes, AI steals the headlines, but it’s not just the rote output of our new Machine Bosses that makes for watered-down marketing, it’s the extreme emphasis on efficiency-at-all-costs thinking that is driving us to be less creative. Less interesting.
2 - The world is becoming more noisy with every post, poke, xeet, and tweet.
You know about the attention economy. Maybe you’ve already run in the other direction and booked yourself a silent meditation retreat. There is so. much. noise. in front of us that very few things ever shake us from our trance and make us notice, smile, laugh, cry, or feel anything authentic.
But when we do feel those feelings, when we do notice something that breaks the homogeneity and monotony, we sure do like it.
People respond to creativity.
Creative people (which, in my opinion, can be all people) have the potential to generate this response.
Creative companies (of which there are several and, with a little bit of help, there could be many many more) know how to invest in this work.
And the outcomes are evident.
We wanted to make things practical, so we created a downloadable resource for you. Go here to get a pitch deck for a creative strategy / creative brief. You can also start a paid subscription to Kumbaya to get this pitch deck plus our entire library of brand, story, and creative resources past, present, and future. Just $5/mo.
Why creativity makes such a big impact
You can grow in a number of different ways – hustle, money, grind, luck. But creativity is a lever that can get people and companies just as far and be a lot more fun along the way.
Creativity is a key driver of impact in careers, companies, and in society at large. And while you may choose to layer other growth drivers on top of creativity, you should be especially considerate of the unique power that creativity has to move the needle. Here’s why:
1 - It is differentiated.
When you use creativity at work, you will be the signal amidst the noise. There is a reason why so many office shows seem drab and tan – work is not a traditionally vibrant place. Creativity stands out, and it is differentiated by definition: remember, creativity is the combination of disparate ideas to create something new.
2 - It is alluring.
Psychologically, we humans are drawn to creative work. No one has ever been tempted to spend more time with a spreadsheet (spreadsheet olympic TV excluded). People have been tempted to spend more time with the marketing for the Barbie movie.
3 - It is rewarding.
We feel fulfilled doing work that is creative and ambitious and out of the ordinary. Now we just need more people and businesses to reward creativity in the same way we do! (working on it)
This differentiated, alluring, rewarding work of creativity can be applied as a difference-maker in a number of big areas. Here are the areas that we spend our time and energy focusing on at Bonfire. If this appeals to you, drop us a note to say hello.
For careers: Creativity is the solution for the work blahs
A Gallup poll revealed that 85 percent of workers are disengaged at their jobs, and 81 percent are looking for new roles.
Um, that’s not good!
Something needs to change about the way that we work. There seem to be several clear advantages to imbuing your work with more creativity. Clearly whatever we’re doing now isn’t working.
When you bring creativity to your work, the following happens:
1 - Creativity gives you agency
According to BetterUp one of the biggest reasons for overwhelm is that we are not in control of our situation, drowning in busywork that we didn’t choose. Never is this more true in the modern workplace. But by embracing creativity, you then become the one choosing how you perform your tasks, even if you can’t determine what your tasks need to be.
Problem-solving, your way, is one of the most powerful salves of a stagnant work environment. Have to give a presentation at work? Who’s stopping you from including a live table read of a scene from Mean Girls?
2 - Creativity gives you inspiration
And vice versa! The more you embrace all the wonderful things in the world around you, the more your creative juices will flow. And by bringing a sense of creativity to your work, you can be inspired to take on work challenges in new and interesting ways.
Quarterly planning might sound like the most jargon-y season of life ever, but it can be a bit more tolerable if you start your planning with a questionstorm or you reference your one-of-these-days vision board.
Inspiration leads to motivation, motivation leads to productivity, producing things leads to feedback on things, and feedback — when given with love — leads to encouragement.
It’s a virtuous cycle (not a growth loop!) that will make your career more fulfilling.
3 - Creativity leads to better work
I’m biased toward creative work. But then again, we all are! “Better” work, in this context, can mean a number of different things: better performing, better looking, better feeling. So long as creativity is elevating the work you do, it remains extremely valuable to keep it up.
The reason the work is better is that you are more engaged while you’re doing it, and the output is more unique among all the other noise and same-ness that people produce everyday.
4 - Creativity opens up new opportunities for you
It’s tough out there to get a job. Creative approaches to your career help you stand out in a crowded market. There are a few different ways you can do this:
Combine different skillsets. Maybe you’re a brand marketer with a knack for Google Search ads. Maybe you’re a designer who writes copy like a pro. Maybe you’re a senior leader who does improv on weeknights, just like Michael Scott. The combination of different skills creates a profile that is wholly original and will be noticed.
Bring your unique POV to new industries. There’s something magical about B2C strategies in a B2B context, or a video marketer shaking up an SEO company. With more companies looking for an edge (see below), they will looooove hearing your original take on how to turn their industry on its head.
By specializing, you can increase your value. Pick your lane (or lanes), go deep, and own your worth. The world has tons of generalists; the world needs more people with a creative belief in the work they do.
For companies: Creativity is the (free) advantage you’ve been looking for
It would seem that you can’t put a price tag on creativity, but people have! Companies with creative leadership beat revenue expectations at a 67% rate.
There are a few reasons why this may be true.
1 - Sameness won’t cut it
There are serious business playbooks that companies across industries choose to follow. These playbooks are, I imagine, leather-bound tomes that sit in oaken bookshelves on the Zoom walls of senior vice presidents. The problem with these books, apart from lacking a CTRL+F function for quick reference, is that everyone has the same playbook.
When you have the same playbook, you build the same business.
When you build the same business, you put your audience to sleep.
When your audience is sleeping, you can’t sell them anything.
Sameness sedates. Creativity in the way that you build your brand, the way that you talk about your product, the way that you engage with your audience – this is a far more attractive and powerful way to grow.
2 - Creativity is not just a brand exercise
Sure, some of the most viscerally creative work will come out of your marketing team from those brilliant brand marketers and creatives and content people, bless them.
But there is a litany of other places within the business where creativity can find a foothold:
Your go-to-market motion: There are more than just one or two ways to sell. We’ve seen the rise of Product-Led Growth. There’s been Community-Led Growth, Customer-Led Growth … Creativity-Led Growth?
What you sell: You probably know the most obvious things that you sell. But creativity can unlock other possibilities that you might not have realized. What if you monetize your company blog or podcast? What if you turn your influencers into co-sell partnerships? What if you sell the rights to the name of your Slack channel? (OK, bad idea, but bad ideas are part of my creative process.)
How you organize: Creativity can extend all the way to your org chart. Some organizations may choose to forgo a marketing team altogether and instead create teams for Growth and for Creative. Some may choose to combine teams that are core to their buying persona with teams that are core to selling to that persona – IT people as part of the Sales org for an IT product? Say less.
For society: Creativity is the cure for all the world’s problems
OK, maybe creativity won’t solve all the world’s problems.
But I’ll take any amount of societal problem-solving I can get.
The concept of “militant optimism,” the commitment to imagining a better world and striving to make that world real, requires creativity. Hope requires us to be able to picture what the world could be.
Movements don’t just happen on their own. Someone has to spark a creative way to solve a problem and take the action necessary to work toward change.
U.S. Representative Cori Bush slept on the steps of the Capital to protest an eviction freeze
Companies paid for abortion travel for their teammates who needed it
Mark Ronson created a trash-eating robot that cleans the seas of pollution
Movements like these, big and small, required a creative kickstart.
We don’t want to remain stagnant as a society. No problem will get fixed by inertia. And there are too many problems to fix. If our current ideas aren’t working, then we need more ideas. And if we need more ideas, then creativity is a surefire way to get there.
Conclusion
Creativity is necessary, especially now, as a differentiator from the homogeneity and as a strategy to cut through the noise.
The current state of careers is rather depressing. The current growth paths for companies are rather uninteresting. Society is crumbling to pieces!
We believe in a world where creativity is embraced for the true differentiator that it can be. There is enough evidence in the careers and companies that are flourishing today that we should be taking creativity more seriously as an investment in the way that we work.
Want to join us?
Stay tuned for more creative content still to come, and reach out to us any time … whether you want to do a workshop, if you want to start 1:1 coaching, or if you just want to say hi.
Don’t leave empty-handed …
We made a pitch deck template for a creative brief so that you can practice your creative expression on the regular.
You can get the template here, or you can start a paid subscription to our newsletter to get access to all of our creative resources past, present, and future. Unlimited access for as little as $5 per month.
For more …
Follow us on LinkedIn for our un-LinkedIn takes and on Instagram for the realest of content. Stay tuned to our Substack space for new community features and ways to meet your fellow subscribers.
And let us know if you’d like to go deeper with us to talk about you and creativity. We do:
1:1 coaching and mentorship 🤩 most popular 🤩
Team workshops and consulting for marketing and leadership
Speaking and appearances on podcasts and at events