Scott Hull Associates

Teachable Moment

CREATIVITY.

So I’ve been trying to understand how the creative process is affecting today’s businesses. What does it take, I wonder, to make the collaboration between creativity and corporate more fluid? To find out, I’m gleaning information from lots of websites and magazines like Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. It goes pretty quickly, though, because they are all saying the same thing: Old ideas aren’t working. “What we learned in business school is upside down and sideways,” they say. “Customers control the company, advertising is driving customers away, and demographics have less meaning.”

And sure enough, when IBM’s Institute for Business Value asked 1,500 chief executives to name the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future, the CEOs unanimously said “creativity”.

Frank Kern of IBM Global Business Services summed it up. “That’s creativity – not operational effectiveness, influence or even dedication,” he says. “Global complexity is the foremost issue confronting these CEOs and their enterprises.” Now, in the past creativity wasn’t viewed so much as an essential leadership asset, but more as just fuel for R&D. Not anymore. Today creativity must “permeate the enterprise,” he explains.

So what does this mean to agencies, design firms, and marketing groups? What about the illustrators, copywriters, and photographers? How is this big-business focus on creativity trickling down to us folks in the creativity-delivery business? I decided to ask a number of branding firms’ top creative executives to find out.

“What,” I asked them, “is the client expecting from you today?” The answers turned out to be our slogan.

Originality: CEOs have realized creativity isn’t “nice to have”; it’s necessary. At least if you want to reinvent your relationship with the customer. And you do – the current landscape is so template-based and commoditized, there’s rarely an emotional connection between businesses and the people they’re talking to. The estimates say one fifth of revenues will have to come from new sources; if you can’t unleash wealth, you have to create it.

Collaboration: As clients break from traditional, “here’s what we’ll do for the next decade” strategy planning and shift to rapid-fire fluidity that lets them adjust their business models on the fly, it’s more important than ever to have a relationship with a solid partner they can rely on.

Results: The shift in corporate culture is toward something far more transparent and entrepreneurial. Companies must emotionally engage the customer. The customer will reward the company’s ability to build a creative process with fluid business models, not absolute ones. As one creative executive put it, “The right visual combination creates insane loyalty.”

Bottom line, the more complex the world becomes, the more its leaders will value creativity. And today’s CEOs know it.

That’s why, at Scott Hull Associates, we deliver what every CEO wants – meaningful original art for companies that use visual branding to drive markets. And fortunately, with 18 acclaimed artists on our roster, creativity is never in short supply.