Don’t Let Tactics Supplant Creativity
I just wrote a post on Viget Engage about marketing driving tactics, not the other way around. A comment inspired me to write a followup post. In the Viget post I argued that tactics shouldn’t drive ideas as much as ideas should drive tactics. However, Michael Stalker rightly pointed out that technology is a two way street.
In other words, while a bigger idea should be driving all of your marketing tactics, simply playing around with as many tools as you can will help shape your thinking. Look at the iPhone + Augmented Reality, that’s expanding our brains daily. Unless you actually understand the tools at your disposal and the ethos in which they reside, you’re still in trouble — even with a big idea (I’ll be writing a post on that later as well).
That being said, I fear those tools are replacing creativity for many marketers and strategists, not expanding creativity (not the tools fault, the user). In today’s marketplace you’re “creative” if you aggregate tweets, or you’re “creative” because you have an iPhone version of your site. In an effort to stay up-to-date and use the latest and greatest, the tools can eventually take the drivers seat. We begin to box our brains in based on the newest tools vs. expanding our thinking to become better at problem solving.
I can’t tell you how many times conversations start out with “How should we use Twitter?” On rare occasion that is, perhaps, the best way to start. But I believe that’s the minority. Instead, conversations should start with,
“What will truly involve the user? How do we connect them with our brand? How do we connect with them? How do we improve their lives? How do we surprise them? How can we help them overcome their problem?”
If Twitter becomes one of the tactics used to answer those questions (and most of the time it should be IMHO), that’s great. If not, leave it alone for now.
I’d like to think Nike+ didn’t start with asking “How can we use iPods?” I’d like to think it started with “How can we help runners improve their training and enjoy it more?”
It is a two way street, but creative ideas will always win because new tools can be built to match them, and they are being built every day.
