Enough

As usual the new year has started with a wealth of articles offering advice for marketers for the year ahead. This year it seems that most of the soul searching is about whether marketers should be generalists or specialists. This is a good debate, however deep within this discussion lies a subtext that I’m increasingly frustrated by. It seems strategy and creativity are an either/or. You’re either strategic or creative, but you can’t be both.

The root of this lies in the fact that creativity has become a charged word. Something attached to the less substantial, promotional end of marketing. The domain of Creatives; the carefree dreamers, the people with their heads in the clouds, the people who ‘colour in’ etc. The otherworldly people that non-marketers (and some marketers!) are uncomfortable being around. And with this comes the inference that if you’re creative, you’re not something else. To be creative means you’re not strategic, grounded, responsible etc.

So, you pays your money, you takes your choice: Strategic or creative?

Which leads most commentators to declare the primacy of strategic thinking, and therefore proclaim that marketers don’t need to be creative, they just need to be able to ‘buy’ creativity. The trouble is this massively underplays the importance and skill required to effectively buy strong ideas. If four years on the agency side have taught me anything, it’s that the single biggest determinant of whether a transformational idea gets the green light is the ability of the client to recognise the idea for what it is, and to champion it through the choppy waters of the big corporation.

Buying creativity is not like popping to the local corner shop for a pint of milk. To do it effectively requires genuine belief in the power of a strong idea and a desire for transformation rather than incrementalism. It also requires imagination, vision and bravery. And these are ‘muscles’ that need to be diligently nurtured and developed. Our left-brain dominant education and business systems automatically take care of our logical and analytical skills, but you don’t often hear people talk about something like imagination as a prized business skill.

So, can we please stop talking about strategy and creativity as polar opposites?

Instead, can we reclaim the broader meaning of creativity beyond the narrower ‘colouring in’ definition we seemed to have slept walked into? Jamming the two things together rather than treating them as a choice could open up a world of possibilities. If someone offered you a ‘creative strategy’ for an intractable business problem, would you be interested?

And what about some ‘strategic creativity’? Sounds better doesn’t it?

Phil is co-founder of 101. Read more from him in our Clubhouse.