Business

Applying Creativity To Your Business – A Few Key Areas

Written by Chloe Harwood

An entrepreneur of any kind of business needs to have a variety of personality traits in order to achieve success. There are too many of those traits to list here, but arguably one of the most important is creativity. No matter how you manage to harbor your own creativity, you will find that it is an important influence in many different aspects of your business. Creativity is very often what gives your business and its practices more depth, and it is worth thinking about what parts of running a business in particular can benefit from a little creative push. Let’s have a look at just a few of those aspects.

Leadership

There are many ideas surrounding what makes a good leader, and it often seems as if there is no one correct answer to the question. But something which many people agree on is that having some kind of a creative impulse is often going to help the leader fully take part in their leadership role. A more creative leader can easily get much more out of their subordinates, and will also find it much easier to communicate what they want to those colleagues too. But how can you easily encourage the leaders in your organization, as well as yourself, to bring a little more creativity to the role? As it happens, it might not be all that difficult.

One of the major ways in which you can encourage creativity in your leadership colleagues is to simply make it known that you expect it. If you advertise for the role by specifying that you need someone with a strong creative sense, you will find that you can more easily bring such individuals into your team. After that, it is a matter of allowing them to bring their creativity to the day-to-day running of the business. You will probably find that once you start allowing and encouraging this, people generally run with it. Before you know it, your business will be seeing many real gains, many of which you might never have expected from your business. There is no doubt that having creative leaders makes for a creatively run business – and that always benefits you.

Product

The product is hugely important – it is, after all, what ends up in the customers’ hands. As such, the originality and uniquity of your product is something that you want to ensure you are working on improving at all times. Clearly, having a good sense of creativity is always going to help in these cases. If you bring creativity to your product development process, you will end up with products which are more likely not only to suit the role they are meant for, but which have that little extra something your customers are generally looking for.

The key here is to take a look at each stage of your product development process, and work hard to allow the creativity of yourself and your colleagues to flow. In the brainstorming and ideation phases, be sure to specify to your colleagues that nothing is off limits. This will encourage them to share all ideas which come into their heads, and that means you have much more material to work with.

Similarly, you should endeavor to let your engineers, designers and so on use their own innate creativity in actually building the product’s prototype, and the final finished product itself. There are a huge number of ways in which this can help to lead to a more complete and polished product, and you can’t really appreciate the many benefits of it until you have applied it to your own business. Give it a go today, and see what happens to your sales of new products after launch.

Marketing

The way you market your business actually says a lot about that business. Marketing which is unoriginal, stale or uninteresting is much less likely to succeed on a grand scale, and that is something that all marketers come to understand quite quickly. In fact, one might argue that there is no aspect of business which is quite as important for creativity as marketing. If your marketing is creative, you can be sure that your business will be doing pretty well. But what does creative marketing look like?

Firstly, it is worth thinking again about where you advertise. Original and less often used ideas such as branding on custom badges can make all the difference in the world, and it is one of the best ways to get your brand noticed in a creative manner. If you are interested in that kind of marketing, you can find out more and research the many places you might choose to place your brand.

But it’s not just where you put your stamp, but how you do it too. Creative marketing works so well because it encourages the consumer to remember your brand more effectively than other brands. How you do this is entirely up to you (in other words, down to your own creativity), but the important thing is that you do it at all. The more creativity you bring to your branding attempts, the more likely it is that you will sooner become a household name.

It’s also worth thinking about the rhythms of your marketing, and this is somewhere else that a little original thought can really make a huge difference. If you let yourself think outside the box a little, you will be able to dream up the perfect combination of drip or burst marketing that you can for your brand or product, and that alone will make a huge difference. Done right, your marketing can easily benefit from your own innate creativity, and it is definitely worth allowing your creativity to shine in this area in particular.

By allowing creativity to be an ordinary and encouraged aspect of your business, you are heralding in a new age for your organization – one which will, in all likelihood, bring with it many improvements.

About the author

Chloe Harwood