Ramon Vullings and Godelieve Spaas are co-authors of Creativity Today (along with Igor Byttebier).
Ramon is a consultant at New Shoes Today, and is a champion of selling ideas around creation, innovation and change. He has a knack for stepping back and looking at everything from a much bigger picture.
Godelieve is also a consultant at New Shoes Today, and is an expert on guiding organizations through change.
In short, if we were forming a world-wide committee to restructure the marketing and advertising industry, they would be some of the first people I would call. So I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to squeeze some fresh, juicy and innovative thoughts on marketing and branding out of them.
Q: What is your view of the state of organizational marketing and branding? Where should creativity fit into this?
Ramon: The state in general? A very mixed landscape. Creativity is used (understood) in 2 ways, the PR-people who ‘own’ creativity in terms of new ways to grab the customer’s attention and the radical new way of positioning a product or service. It requires a lot of creativity to come up with new views especially in mature markets/products.
Q: In what ways do organizations tend to limit themselves in their thinking and actions in regards to their own capabilities and their industry? How can an organization overcome this tendency and use it as a point of differentiation amongst their competitors, specifically in their branding efforts?
Ramon: In many ways, here a lot of presuppositions come in play. Many industries still limit their view on ‘how this industry works’ while actually you can redefine an entire industry by challenging the basic assumptions, the takes taken for granted. A few examples: EasyJet has clearly redefined the airline industry (do we need tickets? do we need allocated seats? do we need free newspapers on onboard? etc…). Their totally new view on the way things always have been done has opened up a full mature market.
Q: What are presuppositions? And how can reinforcing them and also breaking them play an important part in an organizations marketing efforts?
Ramon: Presuppositions are assumptions on which on view on things is based. Presuppositions are a marketer’s strongest enemy and friend if it comes to new experiences. People expect something form a product of service. Yet by breaking presuppositions you can play with the experience, doing something people don’t expect, add value where they didn’t expect it or take out cumbersome steps in processes. All aimed to alter the experience.
Q: With the introduction of social media, and the rise of conversation on the web, what new opportunities to do see for organizations to harness the power of creativity?
Ramon: The rise of social networking opens up so many options to be creative. Creativity is a value neutral term, is works for good and bad. From a marketing perspective you can be very creative with all the personal data available on the web (in example see the enormous amount of spam which is being pushed out these days), yet this is probably a bad way of using the information. Being creative in a positive way is that you can now look for new combinations in areas you would not have thought there was a connection, between people, brands and behaviors.
Q: What would you say to an organization that is clearly stuck in the old model of marketing, which is rapidly losing it’s effectiveness? Is creativity the answer to overcoming their apparent risk aversion?
Ramon: A creative basic attitude helps, yet creativity is nothing without clear leadership. The guts to let go of things (products, services, ideas) and the power to push things through, as it takes a lot of leadership to introduce new ideas.
Godelieve : Creativity is only partly an answer to that. In fact what is needed is what I call responsive marketing. Responsiveness has always been a very important capability of marketing and sales, and it will be key in the future. The focus will change from awareness of what is, to what is changing. So from one form to what is in between two forms, in between two situations. The more you are capable to respond to what is to come the more effective you can be. Of course, the moment you know what is coming up, your creativity comes in very handy, to find an answer for that.
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More with Ramon and Godelieve:
Creativity & Innovation Part II
Chris,
I enjoyed reading your view and reading your blog for the first time. (It’s beautifully designed, by the way).
I think it’s interesting that, despite your prodding, Ramon didn’t answer either of your questions about branding directly. I’ve found this myself when talking to people in other marketing fields (e.g. Seth Godin). They just don’t look at things from a branding or brand perspective.
I’m not sure whether it’s a case of one way being right, the other wrong but it does make communication difficult.
Martin
@Martin – I wonder if the fact that the term “brand” is often convoluted has anything to do with this.
Branding means many different things to different people. Sadly most see branding as the visual appearance of a company and nothing more.
Instead of clarifying their position, maybe they distance themselves from the term to minimize the risk of being misunderstood.
Yes, I think that’s right. I recently came across a beautiful, comprehensive and, I think, entirely accurate brand concept map:
http://www.dubberly.com/brand.html
But it’s so complicated! So, I think that what happens is that people pick up on one piece of the map and then use this as a inaccurate proxy for everything: “Brand is a promise”, “Brand is experience” etc etc. Just partial truths at best.
On the other hand, ignoring brand altogether doesn’t seem right either.
@Martin – And we can bet that the strongest brands out there are very aware of and are involved in as many of their brand’s touch points as they can be. Dumbing it down or ignoring just isn’t a smart strategy.
Thanks for the great resource. I’ve been looking for something graphical like this for an upcoming presentation.