Lame Excuses for Being Boring - #1

I'm starting to collect a series of lame excuses for why a company doesn't have creative products, services, marketing, or marketing communications.

Here's the first:

"We can't afford to hire the top creative minds."

Then cultivate creativity among the team you already have. Research shows that for persons with enough intelligence to have attended college (an IQ of about 115 or higher), success is less a product of innate talent than of preparation, practice, and opportunity. (Read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers for more information on this.)

Your marketing department, or product design team, or logistics personnel, or supply chain managers, have the capacity to think of creative ways to better serve your customers. To communicate better, to design better products, to reach them better, to provide better value (greater quality or less expense). You need to inspire them.

How do you inspire their creativity? Give them an afternoon at the movies - watching YouTube videos of excellent tv commercials and human zaniness. Send them to a park, or museum, or art gallery for the morning. Take them to lunch at a themed restaurant. Hold your next brainstorming session in a lime green room full of bean bag chairs, playdough, and whiteboards. Confiscate all pens - write with crayons instead. Have everyone name the most creative thing they've seen this week, then free associate to think of creative things that could work for your brand. Make your team act out a story using puppets (a story they make up as they go along, not one they know already).

Inspire creativity. Expect creativity.