When a young Alicia Arnold heard those words, they didn’t sit right with her. After all, what about stools that you see in diners that have just one leg and are flared at the bottom?

Alicia, who serves as senior vice president of Digital at Hill Holiday, eventually grew to see her own natural inclination to question conventional wisdom (“Everyone knows stools have three legs!”) not only as a sign of her nascent creativity,  but also as an important component of the creative process as a whole, a process she has committed herself to studying, practicing, and, above all, teaching.

In the most recent episode of our Marketing Smarts Podcast, we talked to Alicia about her new book, Creatively Ever After, and the many myths surrounding creativity. At the center of our conversation was one myth in particular: Creativity cannot be taught. It’s important to dispel this myth for several reasons.

First of all, as businesses increasingly become publishers, marketers (and others) feel more and more pressure to create interesting, engaging, and useful content. They also need to figure out ways to re-imagine the content they have produced and are producing. To do this well, you need to develop your creative skill set and apply it to the content challenges your company faces.

And of course, as soon as you are talking about a “skill set,” you are talking about something that can be taught!

Second of all, no one can do it alone. “Creativity takes teamwork,” as Alicia puts it.

According to her, the creative process consists of at least four different abilities:

1. The ability to clarify a problem or situation (which usually involves asking a lot of questions)
2. The ability to come up with new ideas (or “ideate”)
3. The ability to develop ideas into workable solutions
4. The ability to implement these solutions and make ideas a reality

Because  most people turn out to be strong in one of these four areas, and because very few are equally strong in all four, creative solutions generally require a group effort.

Moreover, Alicia has found that as people become aware of these different aspects of creativity, they not only begin to appreciate their own role in the creative process, but they also start to see how one might harness the creative capabilities of diverse individuals across the organization (rather than assuming, as many do, that creativity is the special purview of just one department).

This leads to point three: Unleashing the creative capabilities of individuals across your organization can actually transform it.

In the podcast, Alicia tells a story about teaching a certain project manager, who was very good at asking clarifying questions, how to understand the ways in which she was, without even realizing it, practicing a form of creativity. A few weeks later, this woman came back to Alicia and said, “People say I’m different now, that I’m more fun to work with.” Can you imagine the impact if people said that about everyone working for your company?

If you want to hear more tales of creativity unleashed, and how Alicia has gotten people to experience their own creativity, you can listen to the entire podcast right here:

(Of course, you can always subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.)

Transcript: Marketing Smarts – Episode 4 – Alicia Arnold

To learn how companies from IBM to Garden Fresh Restaurants have found creative ways to improve the effectiveness of their marketing, become a PRO member and check out these case studies.

One of my company designers sent this to me. Thank you, Michelle Lydon of Symbiosis Designs in Toronto.
Here’s the YouTube description:
Behind the scenes tour of of an award-winning creative farm, juicing process and distribution in South West England.
The South West produces some of the UK’s finest creative work (animation, web design, design, fashion, architecture….) Now you know why….nice conditions, space to breathe and opportunities with some of the best firms around.

Your turn… what’d ya think? Creative or not? Or do you have to appeciate British humor to enjoy it?

It’s a real threat for anyone close to or over 40 and scares the living hell out of me. For at an age when executives in other industries are hitting their professional stride, advertising creatives are uniformly being tossed out and left for dead.
The story is familiar. We all seem to know someone who was a creative director at a big agency, making a comfortable six-figure salary. One day an account leaves, the CD loses his job and suddenly he can’t seem to find another.
He freelances, plays his connections. But all he can find are a succession of lower-paid jobs in less glamorous areas of the industry until he’s freelancing for a small medical agency in the ‘burbs and has the sell their house to put the kids through college.
Now there are plenty of reasons that advertising casts off its senior members. Overly inflated salaries. Inability to keep up with changing technology. Perceived unwillingness to put in the same 80 hour weeks as the 25-year-olds. But mostly it’s about prejudice: the notion that nothing new or interesting can come out of a 55-year-old mind and that even if it could, this person is not the face the agency wants to show to the world.
Or is he?
As the Baby Boom ages, there will suddenly be a giant cohort of seniors. None of whom particularly care about Facebook or Twitter. Their cultural references are to the Jackson 5, not Maroon 5. And yet there’s no reason to believe they’re going to suddenly stop buying the same high end and trendy gear they always have been. So who is going to advertise to them? Will there be any creatives left who can speak the same language?
Chances are there won’t be. As I’ve noted before, our industry is driven by a misguided belief that every ad needs to be judged by the standards of an, upscale 30-something white, male hipster And so ads aimed at Boomers will be written in accordance with an aesthetic that isn’t their own.
If an agency, somewhere, would discover the value of retaining senior creatives on anything other than the most unsexy pharma accounts, they’d probably discover they’d found a real market niche. That they were able to talk directly to the sweet spot of their target in a voice the target, the people actually buying the product, found both real and convincing. And that they were able to make themselves and their clients a lot of money doing so.
If.

The process made me realize that among the ways we could do better is in the discovery and new and unique ways to achieve success. Although new strategies might be hard to come by, I suspect that you can offer us new ways to launch and manage those strategies for success.
I challenge each of us to step up to the plate and swing for the fences. What one, two or three tips work best for your clients and how do they work for you? To be a good sport, I’ll begin.
1. Network: No matter my client’s products or services, my first piece of advice to grow their business and to build their brand and marketing image is to get out of the office and meet others in business. They need not be potential clients, as one of the best ways to grow a business is through referrals and leads. This strategy only works if we are committed to relationship building. Build relationships and within a year your business will begin reaping the benefits of those relationships. My unique tip: I reach out to all my competitors, take them to coffee, sometimes refer business to them, and in return, they do the same.
2. Know What Your Best Customer Looks Like: How can you market to your best customers if you don’t know who they are and what they look like? And how can you ask for referrals and leads if you can’t describe what those referrals and leads should look like? Identify your best customers by industries, positions of decision makers (e.g., CEO, CMO, CFO, etc.), size of revenue, number of employees, geography, values, their customers, their state of growth, and so on. My unique tip: When you visit a client, notice what they read. This will tell you much about who they are.
3. Writing and Speaking: This goes along with number 1. Get out of the office, get known, and build relationships. Write and speak about what you know that others want to learn or seek verification. Keep in mind, it is about the audience, not about us. My unique tip: Offer to speak in exchange for expenses. I do this for those I am trying to build long-term relationships with. First, it is a nice way to honor the relationship and second, a good way to grow referrals and leads and to spread word of mouth marketing regarding your speaking ability and availability.
Those are three broad strategies. Feel free to share tactics that spell out specific ways to achieve strategic success in any of those categories or share new and different strategies and tactics? What works and what doesn’t?