Report 103

Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

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Wednesday 22 August 2013
Issue 235

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your twice-monthly (or thereabouts) newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.


Note

Most articles in this issue of Report 103 can also be found in the archives together with dozens more articles, papers and thoughts.


 

In this issue of Report 103

  1. Feeling the Creative Sizzle
  2. Creative Monsters
  3. Advice to Budding Entrepreneurs

 

Feeling the Creative Sizzle

There's a saying in marketing, "It's not the steak, it's the sizzle." In other words, people do not really buy a product. Rather, they buy the emotions and feelings associated with the product. Steak is not bought because it's a chunk of beef. But, because if it is well cooked, it will taste delicious (if you are not a vegetarian, anyway!) Sales and marketing people know this. That's why car advertising, for example, focuses on the feelings associated with the car, rather than raw statistics about why one car is better than another. Volvos usually markets its car as safe vehicles: they are not selling an engine and four wheels, but security for you and your family. BMW, on the other hand, touts the pleasure of driving a well engineered performance car. This is, of course, old hat in marketing. However, it is often ignored when it comes to product and service innovation.

Anticonventional thinking sessions, brainstorms, ideas campaigns and other ideation activities tend to focus on general product improvement challenges. We tend to ask "How can we make our steaks juicer?" Or, "How can we package our steaks to retain freshness longer?" We seldom ask, "How can we provide our customers with better sizzle?" So, it is up to the marketing people to take the new product concepts and sell the sizzle. Fortunately, marketing people tend to be good at that sort of thing. Unfortunately, companies that fail to innovate the sizzle miss out on a lot of opportunities.

For instance, you might ask how to provide the sizzle to a vegetarian. More and more families include one or more vegetarians together with meat eaters. Yet, as a vegetarian, I can assure that most of the vegetarian meat substitutes (like veggie burgers) are less than appealing. Or, you might ask how you can enhance the sizzle and develop a range off sauces to serve with your steaks.

Business Sizzle

Even in the world of business to business (B2B) sales, feelings are critical in selling products and services. You don't hire a law firm, you hire security and reassurance. You don't hire a web development firm because of the programming experience of the team -- but for the way in which they project your corporate image.

If are running a business and wish to expand your product and service line, ask yourself: "in what other ways could we provide a similar sizzle to our clients?" This could throw up some unexpected ideas that are outside your area of expertise, but which make sense.

For instance, if you are in the training business and your primary work is to provide leadership training to up and coming managers; and you wish to expand your services, your initial reaction might be to look for other training courses you could offer -- after all, you are a training company. But the sizzle you provide your clients is giving young managers confidence to lead people. You also give the senior managers the confidence that young managers will be able to manage their teams better. So, you should look for training courses that expand upon the feeling of confidence you give managers. You might also try something completely different, like partnering with a tailor/dressmaker to provide new managers with clothes that make them feel confident. Or you might sell subscriptions to health and fitness centres to ensure that desk-bound leaders stay in good health and look good, which is also important to confidence.

Such services would be outside your realm of expertise, but you can partner with other firms to provide complementary sizzle. Such arrangements could work for all the partners.

And if you are launching a new business, use your creativity to define not only your product, but the sizzle it will provide. This will help you define your product more creatively as well as ensure it is more market friendly than if you only focus on the technical details of your product.

 

More Creative than the Average Creativity Expert

What kind of...

  • speaker would you like for your next innovation event?
  • facilitator do you think would deliver more value at your next creativity workshop?

Someone with lots of corporate experience in businesses like yours or an international artist, author and entrepreneur?

If you'd prefer the international artist, author and entrepreneur, give me a call. I can do something wonderful and unique for you and your team!

Reply to this email, ring +32 2 305 6591 or contact me here to discuss your needs.

 

Advice to Budding Entrepreneurs

By Jeffrey Baumgartner

The typical person wanting to start her own businesses is compelled to build a product or design a service she feels the market lacks, either because the product or service does not yet exist locally or because she feels she can provide it in a better way than can existing businesses. Sometimes, an entrepreneur believes she has come up with a truly new product or service the market does not even know it desires!

In my experience, however, far too many highly talented entrepreneurs do poorly and even fail at their businesses, not because their products are weak or fail to address a hole in the market, but because they lack the ability to sell those products. Meanwhile, many people with fantastic sales skills, but less impressive products succeed; often spectacularly. It does not seem fair, but it happens.

My advice to the budding entrepreneur is not to focus on your potential product. Rather, focus on what you can sell. And if you cannot sell, find a budding entrepreneurial business partner who can.

Creative Focus

Likewise, the budding entrepreneur should not focus her creativity on the product and hope it sells itself. From the beginning, she needs to exert creative energy on how she will market and sell her product.

Example

A software programmer might have a brilliant idea for a software product that would help big businesses perform some process efficiently. But, if she is not familiar with selling software to big business, she will quickly find that it's a difficult process in a highly competitive market. Worse, if her product is any good, others will soon copy it conceptually and sell their versions more aggressively.

So, she needs either to find a business partner who can sell -- and she needs to involve him from the beginning. Or she needs to devise a product that can comfortably sell on her own, for example: an application that appeals programmers like herself and which she would sell directly to those programmers.

If she opts for the second choice, she needs to start thinking about how she is going to sell the product -- and she needs to start thinking about it before she even begins to program. Her approach to selling will partially define how she should approach the program design.

 

Paintings

Some of my paintings are now available via Saatchi Online. You can see and buy them here.

 

Creative Monsters

Orson Scott Card's classic science fiction novel, Ender's Game, is being made into a film. However, many people feel the film should be boycotted. Why? Because Mr. Card is a notorious, outspoken homophobe. His opinions on the subject upset people, particularly now that homosexuality is becoming more widely accepted globally.

The thing is, if you are going to boycott creative work by people whose opinions or behaviour you find reprehensible, you will soon find that you'll have to boycott an awful lot of work!

Examples

Film director Roman Polanski is a genius. His films are critically acclaimed and he's a very creative man. He's also wanted in the United States of America for drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. He has acknowledged what he has done and there is no disputing this. His excuse was that the girl was no virgin.

One of my favourite authors, Evelyn Waugh, was racist, sexist and a snob -- even by the standards of his time. Yet, there is no doubting his creativity in writing.

Albert Einstein treated his first wife terribly, was often cruel to his children (though he could also be very kind sometimes) and had numerous affairs while married to his second wife. In short, he treated neither his family nor his women well. Pablo Picasso treated his women, children and friends even worse.

Steve Jobs supposedly commissioned his biography so his children could know him. Presumably, that's because he was so busy being creative, he didn't have much time for them. He was also frequently unkind, rude and even cruel to co-workers and others. He is frequently described by those who knew him as a jerk.

Most creative people, who pour out incredible work, at the very least tend to neglect family, lovers and friends in order to focus on their work. Many are far worse.

Separation of Creativity and Creator

I feel that we need to separate the creative work from the creator and give the work the credit and attention it deserves. For if we boycotted every film written or directed by a creative monster, there would be far fewer films available to us. If we refused to read every creative book written by someone whose opinions we find abhorrent, we'd have far fewer books at our disposal. It's not fair. Not fair that some of these people make so much money and achieve such fame from their work. But, I believe we need to accept the work for its own qualities even if the quality of the creator is questionable.

At the same time, we should loudly express our disdain for the behaviour and opinions we find reprehensible. For if writers, artists and scientists learn that their public seriously disapproves of those behaviours and opinions, they might be motivated to change their behaviour. If nothing else, those who would emulate the famous may be discouraged from emulating the bad habits of the famous.

But...

Two final notes. Firstly, not every creative genius is a monster. Douglas Adams, author of the highly imaginative The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books was by all accounts a terribly decent chap. Surrealist artist, René Magritte, married his childhood sweetheart, and they remained a happy couple until he died. Like Adams, he was considered a decent chap and a good friend. Indeed, as artists' lives go, his is considered a bit boring and bourgeois. Arguably, that is a good thing.

Secondly, I've only discussed the behaviour of creative men in this article. Although there are presumably creative women whose opinions, behaviour or both are unacceptable, I do not know of any examples of them. If you know of examples, please share them with me. Or could it be that creative women are less likely to be monsters?

 

My Novel: The Insane Journey

"While The Insane Journey is not an esoteric literary masterpiece by any means, this decadent science-fiction romp reads like an amusing travelogue through a near-future Earth hosted by the hedonistic protagonist Maxwell van Mars. It's reminiscent of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, but with more naughty bits. I recommend this book for anyone who wants a light holiday read that will be remembered as a guilty pleasure. Bon apetit!"

More information here...

 


 

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ARCHIVES

You can find this and every issue of Report 103 ever written at our archives.


Happy thinking!

Jeffrey Baumgartner


 

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Jeffrey Baumgartner
Bwiti bvba

Erps-Kwerps (near Leuven & Brussels) Belgium

 

 


 

My other web projects

My other web projects

CreativeJeffrey.com: 100s of articles, videos and cartoons on creativity   Jeffosophy.com - possibly useful things I have learned over the years.   Kwerps.com: reflections on international living and travel.   Ungodly.com - paintings, drawings, photographs and cartoons by Jeffrey