Creative Marketing Concepts

In a room that's full of people, how will you manage to stand out? The same predicament is faced by many start-up entrepreneurs today who engage in profitable but popular businesses - which is why the need for a creative marketing idea has emerged. Creative marketing concepts are necessary to be able to separate your business from everyone else's. To avoid the crowd when everyone else is gunning for the same prize in the same way, it is best that you take detour and be innovative in your marketing strategies.

Marketing, mind you, has always been a big part of business. It is that which attracts potential customers and brings in the money. But apart from being important, marketing is also expensive and tricky. So an entrepreneur has to be careful of the type he chooses to apply for his business. Traditional advertising methods like radio and television streams have proven their strength in marketing. But they have also gained the reputation of being impractical in light of the financial constraints we all feel today. In replacement, a lot of new marketing methods have emerged like search engine optimization, social media marketing and pay-per-click ads. But these have also evolved to conventional marketing means and are patronized by a lot of congruent businesses. To some extent, its popularity has also made it lose its credibility.

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Creative marketing concepts are hard to come by. And they may be a bit questionable to conservative marketers or those who are looking to save on costs. But considering that they are less explored and potentially captivating means for product or service promotion, these marketing ideas might just be that missing piece you should incorporate in your business to make it successful.

Creative Marketing Concepts

1.) Give away stuff.
If there's one thing people love, it's free stuff. If you want to get folks to flock to your business, give them an incentive. It can be a simple towel or an educational book they can download from your site. Just make sure that what you share is something relevant to your business. And make sure you don't give away EVERYTHING. In replacement of stuff, you can give away free advice on something that is important and connected to your market.

2.) Establish your own YouTube channel (which is cheaper).
People love videos. Google loves videos. Ergo, make and post videos. Relate some to your business. Make some that are intriguing, funny, romantic - address all types of preferences and emotions. The good thing about videos is that they are viral and can be passed on from one person to another, thereby ensuring that your marketing campaign reaches a wide market base.

3.) Lend a hand.
Whether by funding charities or participating in fund-raising event, helping out is good publicity. Aside from this, it is also an opportunity for profitable exposure especially if you are targeting a local market.

4.) Attend conferences and tradeshows.
You not only get to get your goods out there, you also will be able to build you and your business reputation. Conferences and tradeshows spell legitimacy and a drive for development. Who knows, this marketing strategy may not only open doors for clientele support but partnerships as well.

Creative marketing concepts does not actually only involve flashy, colorful marketing mediums. In a broader sense, it means ingenuously and uniquely conceived ideas for business promotion.

Creative Marketing Concepts

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Creative Process Vs Product

This article draws a very important distinction for the artistic endeavor. Why is it important to distinguish between a creative process orientation and a creative product orientation? A large part of the reason has to do with pressure. There is a lot of pressure involved in putting out a finished product to the world, and the associated fears have squelched many a worthwhile project.

So let's start by looking at creative process on it's own merits, entirely separate from proving, selling, and other aspects of the product marketplace.

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CREATIVE PROCESS

Creative Process Vs Product

Is an open ended, messy, experimental exploration.

It is about playing with your materials, both internal and external and seeing where they take you. It is not trying to prove anything, and thus is innocent, like a child's scribbles and mudpies.

You don't have to be a professional, you don't even need to be "good" at it in order to enjoy creative process. You dance around your bedroom to your favorite music, you find yourself dabbling in poetry writing, or suddenly want to try painting. This is for YOU, and so in order to keep your explorations in the sphere of innocence and safety, I recommend that you (at least at the beginning) not share with others. As soon as the idea of showing others our work comes in, it changes the dynamic, so just let this process be about you and for you.

Within this Process based container, you can explore all your curiosities, attractions, and whims of creative outlets and both have a lot of fun, and get to know yourself much better.  You may also stumble across therapeutic methods that help you deal with difficult emotional states. For example, I did a regular personal "dance lab" for a few months one Winter, and whenever intense or angry energy would come up, I would put a big red veil over myself and put on a specific music track and have a spazz out dance. When I would get either too vain or too shy, I would dance with masks to help me get out of myself. I didn't read these ideas in an Expressive Arts Therapy Book (though my bookshelf is full of them and I do recommend them), I just stumbled upon what worked for me while giving space to my process.

Some BENEFITS of CREATIVE PROCESS include:

o    Deepened Self-Insight- gaining access to wise, resourceful aspects of yourself and better understanding your multi-faceted being

o    Easing Suffering- Finding and making creative tools to move through difficult and painful times

o    Having fun with materials and forms without any pressure to make a product or money

o    Stumbling upon a favorite outlet or medium that will become a life-long love affair

o    A great excuse for enriching, self-nurturing time for yourself

* You are Hereby Granted Full Permission to be Messy, Explore, and Create within a realm of Process for as long as you want.  

TRANSITIONING INTO CREATIVE PRODUCT

What do I mean by creative product? Some examples include: recording an album, publishing a book, making a show, a play, choreographing a dance, designing a clothing line, and in any media, creating something for the purpose of being seen or purchased by others.

There may come a time when your organic creative process matures into a genuine desire to create something to share with others. It is only natural for a cultivated garden to bear fruits. But we must be careful as we transition our orientation into product, because many issues can come up such as: people's opinions and expectations influencing our work, ego needs to be seen, loved, validated, etc...,

Self-sabotage in many forms, critical voices (inside & out) squashing the innocence and joy out of it.

   A personal story.

I used to write a lot of songs and sing pretty much every day. For me it was a form of prayer and a joyful and easy extension of my poetry. For many years I mostly sang for myself, nature, and close friends. The times that I did share with larger groups, I got a lot of encouraging feedback and struggled not to let my head swell from the compliments. Part of me insisted that I keep this gift a pure prayer, while another part wanted to share the gift, and the kid in me still liked the idea of becoming a rock star. Finally I decided that I really did want to record a CD. Unfortunately, that inspiration turned to fears and projections and a bunch of subtle self-sabotaging. After years of this, I realized that I wasn't singing any more for devotion's sake and that I had gotten too much in my own way and I threw my hands up and stopped singing and playing the guitar for many years. I let a part of myself push me towards a product, and in that lost a precious gift in my life.

I still haven't fully reclaimed my singing, and that is why I emphasize caution and clear motivation when moving toward a product.

TIPS for Transitioning:

1.) Make sure you feel that the time is ripe and it is a natural internally driven decision

2.) Do some journaling and give a forum for all the different voices in you and their opinions on this decision. Don't ignore the critical voices, just get their messages down on paper. Often these voices have a really good piece of advice, though it may be hidden under a discouraging sound bite. Once you have all the sound bites down on paper you can look at them and see where potential conflicts may arise. Exploring polarized or conflicting voices in theater or on the page can be a highly effective way to resolve them and thus prevent them from playing out in a bigger way in your life.

3.) Keep a commitment to some agenda free process time. Allow yourself to doodle and free write and sing nonsense songs even if you are in a serious process of writing a book, recording an album, etc...

CREATIVE PRODUCT

During process we are always trying to keep the critic and the editor at bay, but now is the time to summon the editor onto the scene. You will need to feel strong enough in your offering to hear others critique and take it into account. This is the time when you really open yourself to feedback and take others perspectives into consideration, as you are now creating for more than yourself- you are creating for an audience, for the world.

The trick is to stay connected to your authentic inspiration and motivation and also polish your works with the world in mind.

At any time that you get too spun out on external orientation and fears, give yourself permission to dip back into process for process's sake and find your well of inspiration there.

Avoid the temptation to add a time pressure and try to push your product out too fast. Give it time to ripen and develop, as a mother does a baby in her womb.  This is not a doo dad from an assembly line, but a creative extension of your essence, extended as a gift to the world. Try not to think too much about the monetary aspects just yet and focus instead on doing the best job you can.

Some blessed days you will just spill forth content and progress gracefully and swiftly. Many days you will want to procrastinate and distract yourself and dig your heals in the dirt. You will need to find your own balance between allowance and self-discipline.

Do your best to enjoy the process. Make it a labor of love.

Doing what you love for all the right reasons will help you to love yourself. Creating from selflessness and self- love will steer you from many a pitfall and greatly enhance the chance that your creation will be of true value and benefit and be loved by others.

Creative Process Vs Product

Audette Sophia is a multi-modal artist and certified coach specializing in helping creative entrepreneurs synthesize their offerings into dynamically successful career strategies. She is also an educator and branding/promotional consultant.

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Creative Kids

Most kids I know are into Face Book and the computer, TV, and video games, not any different than my kids. Our daughter Amanda is 11 years old, she often brings two or three friends home after school. There are very creative and are always looking for new and fun ways of expressing themselves. I have a cricut create die cutting machine, and Amanda uses it for school projects.

Before we got the cricut our kids were really stuck on their electronic devices. They would come home after school and right away they would start playing the WII game or go on their computer or pull out their ipod. They did not have an outlet to express their creativity fully

Creative

Once we purchased the cricut we found that there focus shifted towards more creative activities. Amanda is now really proud of herself when she is able to create wonderful projects that she can present at school. Now some of her friends want to come over to use the Cricut. They really get a sense of accomplishment by creating some unique and individual crafts.

Creative Kids

We now have more of a balance of creative activities for our kids. They have fun using their imagination to create gifts and cards for there friends and family. It's an outlet for creativity that's brings the family together, just like the old days. It's wonderful to see our children creating happily, instead of being programmed by TV and computers? Let have fun with this and get creative!

Creative Kids

Ken Hyman & Diane Mcleod

How To Be Creative - 5 Essential Elements For A Life Of Creativity

Each of us who create have our own unique ways of expressing our creativity, and a number of different forms and media in which we create. But despite this individuality, there are elements common to all of us, each of them essential to have in place for a life of abundant creativity.

Here are 5 of the most important of these elements. Which do you have in place already in your creative life? Which can you add today to help you be more creative?

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1. Creating everyday. The only surefire way to a life of consistent and prolific creativity is to create for a minimum amount each and every day. Because we all structure our lives round a daily calendar, this is the most natural and easy way to also fit in our creative time.

How To Be Creative - 5 Essential Elements For A Life Of Creativity

Don't make the mistake of creating only "when you have a bit of free time", it never comes! Instead, commit to creating at the same time for at least 15 minutes each day. This habit is the backbone of a life of creativity, and the key to discovering the true depths of your creative potential.

2. Keep yourself inspired and stimulated. If you only ever go to the same few places all the time - maybe even only from your bed to your creative workspace for days on end - you'll soon dry up on inspiration.

Creative people more than anyone need constant new stimulation. Visit different places that will delight your senses, and be sure to fully focus on each sense. You have five senses for a reason, make full use of them!

3. Gathering your ideas. Ideas flow to us constantly, our creative minds are permanently active, even when we sleep. Find a way to channel this and you'll have all the creative ideas you'll ever need.

A fantastic tool for capturing your ideas is an ideas journal. This is simply a notebook you carry with you at all times and jot down your ideas as and when they come to you. No more forgotten ideas, no more frustration at not having any new ideas to develop. And the beauty is, the more ideas you have and capture, the more ideas arrive to replace them.

4. A support network. Though much creative work is done alone, having a network of support around you is key to getting the most from your creativity. Too many artists create in what feels like a void or a vacuum, not knowing if any one even KNOWS they create, let alone have people to offer encouragement.

You can either look locally for a group that meets in person, or find a creative community online. Investigate a few possibilities and see how you feel about the people involved and the nature of the group. At the very least, get yourself a creative "buddy" - someone you can check in with regularly to encourage and support each other's creative developments.

5. Acknowledge your progress. Keeping track of how you develop as a creative artist is crucial to staying motivated and realising just how much you do create. Because you're with yourself day in, day out, it can be difficult to measure this and it often feels like you're getting nowhere, stuck in a creative rut.

A great way of keeping up with how much you're creating is to have a mini creative review every 2 or 3 months. Look at what you're creating now compared to a few months ago, and you'll be impressed not only at how you've developed, but also at how much you've created. This then motivates you to create even more.

These are 5 of the most important elements needed for a creative life.

Which do you have in place already? Which could you pick to improve so you create more deeply and more often, and explore more of that limitless creative potential within you waiting to be discovered?

How To Be Creative - 5 Essential Elements For A Life Of Creativity

Looking for a way to kick start your creativity? Then head over to http://www.CoachCreative.com for your free copy of the powerful and practical "Explode Your Creativity!" Action Workbook.

From Creativity Coach Dan Goodwin

Tips on Creative Campaign Ideas

No two minds are alike. Two people, given the same creative brief, will produce vastly different campaigns. This is because ideas don't materialise from thin air. They come from what has been read, experienced and observed everyday.

In addition, some people are more creative than others, because they exercise creative thinking more often. The creative power of the brain is like a muscle - the more it is flexed, the stronger it becomes and the faster the ideas come.

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A lot of the techniques art directors and copywriters use to create ads are techniques borrowed from fiction writing, film and theatre. Books on these subjects make good background reading.

Tips on Creative Campaign Ideas

Having a healthy selection of art and industry advertising books in the office is a must. Pick up some copies of D&AD and specialty reads like Alastair Crompton's Craft of Copyrighting.

Here are some techniques you can use to make your campaign creative stronger, improve brand awareness and the response rate of the campaign.

Keep it simple stupid

KISS. Keep it simple stupid. Express the idea in a small space. On a post-it note, on a napkin. If you can't express your idea in concrete diagram or sentence, you probably don't have an idea. At most, you may have several unrelated parts.

What many marketers find difficult to evaluate are ideas in their infancy. Without the idea rendered with finished images, they are not able to visualise how far the idea can go, or how campaignable an idea is. However, evaluating ideas without too much polish, is advantageous.

It allows concepts to surface, and good ideas to shine.

Cover territories - own spaces

The more ideas you can generate, the more areas or territories you can cover. Coming up with a few disparate ideas is no enough. Creatives instead map ideas to spaces or territories. They identify these territories from customer insights, research and plain intuition.

An idea may be good, but is it strategically placed in the right territory? Choosing the right campaign can be a matter of finding the right idea, in the most fertile territory.

Creatives hunt for new territories, or new ways of seeing existing territories. Otherwise their ideas are unoriginal and lack impact.

Make your idea a campaign

Creatives and clients loathe campaign ideas which cannot scale across different media. These require too much exposition, and too often only work in television.

Marketers should go for campaign ideas which can work not only in the richness of television, but also in small-space banner ads. Otherwise, they miss important touch points.

Turn it on its head

During brainstorming session, clients and agencies often complain they 'get the same ideas'. This may be because the group is afraid to challenge thinking, or the group is suppressing ideas which sound absurd at face value.

Unless the group is prepared to take 'untrodden' paths, brainstorming sessions will yield the same results every time. Participants should let go of their fears and criticism, and turn their thinking on its head.

If car manufacturers always advertise their cars with four wheels, try an idea which features the car with no wheels. These are the kinds of ideas challenge consumers and give rise to free press coverage.

By incorporating a 'what if' exercise during brainstorming can boost the volume of ideas and the effectiveness of the group. Such that the sum of the parts contributed by the group is larger than any one contribution by one mind.

Straight headline, quirky visual

The basic ingredients of a print campaign is a headline and a visual. Creating an ad which shows a quirky visual, and a quirky headline, normally results in an ad which is too bizarre for an audience to interpret. Likewise, if the headline and visual are both straight, the add feels literal and provides no 'ahhha'.

To get a right balance, it seems you need equal parts of the literal and the bizarre in the advertisement. It is worth mentioning that not every ad has both a headline or visual. Some are simply a visual, and some are just a headline.

Is the headline the same as the visual?

Junior creatives often make the mistake of creating ads with a headline and visuals which say the same thing. Beside is an example. This creative is not working very hard. Both the headline and visual say the same thing.

Instead, try placing an unrelated headline and visual together on the page. Separately they don't mean much, but when put together, become a riddle for the audience to solve.

Clever? Or too clever?

The debate over 'clever' advertising never ceases. Clever ads the risk of their audience completely missing the point. Conversely, lame ads go unnoticed.

Both statements are correct. Lame ads lack impact. And being too clever isolate everyone but the judging panel at the awards. The medium, brand and creative, all have to be weighted to produce the desired effect.

For example, a piece for EPURON, designed to be a viral video, could be deemed as too clever. The idea works on multiple levels, personifying the wind and requiring the audience to watch it twice. You have to watch it to get it.

If this was a TVC, asking the audience to watch it twice is next to impossible. However, give the fact the creative was destined to be a viral YouTube video (so it can be played more than once), the witty element works in its favour to make it more viral.

Reference topical issues

Ads can leverage context from the public domain which is current. Sports, religion, politics, sex - these are all fertile places to leverage reference. Building an idea around a topical issue can be very powerful, and often sparks controversy.

Humour, gags, punch lines, pay-offs

Humour is the gag, the punch line, the payoff - these are good techniques to keep audiences reading. Realise that most advertising is interruptive. Compensating consumers by making them smile is the very least we can do for having interrupted them.

Ideas which feature gags that are genuinely funny can get a lot of love and mileage. In fact the funniest ones often offend some segment of society.

When deploying humour, make sure it is funny and is connected to the brand. Otherwise, the gag will be remembered, but the brand quickly forgotten.

Shock value

For some industries, like anti-tobacco smoking, featuring real people dying of smoking-related cancer is statistically proven to more impactful than other techniques.The problem with shock campaigns, is they get tired quickly. They lose shock-value. What was shocking today is mundane tomorrow.

This forces advertisers to go in pursuit of the next shocking visual or statistic. It is not easy to sustain these campaigns in the long run.

Puns and visual puns

These were once very popular techniques. There was a time when you could flick through a magazine, and almost every page featured a pun.

The smarter puns are not created as a headline, but expressed as a visual. These are called visual puns.Most creative people agree the use of puns should be avoided.

Puns are risky. At their heart there is often no core idea, and therefore they are a menace to campaign.

Puns are really a last resort.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition is achieved when the two dipolar visuals are put together. Take for example the faces of two opposing football team coaches; or a cheap car and a luxury car. These are two extremes which share a common relationship, but are very different. Together they create a striking visual.Their extreme differences give birth to a new meaning when placed beside each other.

Juxtaposition can useful for challenging a stereotype, and changing opinions.

Metaphors and hyperbole

Metaphors are one of the most common storytelling techniques. It is no surprise advertisers use them so often. Metaphors borrow from a construct the audience understands, to explain another construct they have little knowledge about.

For example, power plugs could be a metaphor for sexuality.

Metaphors can be a hyperbole too. A hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration for emotional effect. The effect is intentional, and the audience is not expected to interpret hyperbole literally.

Irony

Irony is a mode of expression that calls attention to discrepancy between two levels of knowledge. The definition of irony, in the simplest form, is the difference between what someone would reasonably expect to happen and what actually does. Meaning that something that happens that you would not even reasonably expect to happen is considered irony.

Alliteration

Alliteration is a series of repeated consonant sounds, occurring at the beginning of words or within words. Alliteration is used to create melody, establish mood, call attention to important words, and point out similarities and contrasts. They appear in headlines, in taglines and campaign titles.

Alliteration makes a phrase sound a little catchier, and more memorable.

Sticky ideas

Sticky is normally what you get when one or a combination of the above, works really well. You end up with an advertisement which is talked and written about. An ad campaign that becomes sticky is viral. Without much intervention or media spend, the audience transmits and shares the idea, often modifying it and making it their own.

This recent TVC by Heineken, combined several techniques covered in this article, and nailed it.

Tips on Creative Campaign Ideas

Anthony Coundouris is a director and digital consultant for the digital marketing agency Firestarter.

Servicing multinationals companies in Singapore and South East Asia, Firestarter provides business leaders avenues to engage and convert prospects using social media marketing.

Visit Firestarter to read more articles or contact me.