This morning I have the privilege of giving a creative marketing lecture at Oklahoma State University (Tulsa, OK). Here are a few thoughts from my talk.

WHAT IS CREATIVE MARKETING?

Typically, people think of advertising whenever they think of creative marketing. They think of Nike, Apple, and Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s Burger King ads. Reality is creative marketing is so much more.

WHAT IS MARKETING?

Marketing has four main areas, and you can be creative in all of them.

1. Promotion
   (i.e., advertising, direct marketing, interactive, personal selling, public relations, sales promotion)
   Example: Crispin Porter + Bogusky
2. Product (service)
   Example: Ideo
3. Price
   Example: Psychological Pricing
4. Place (distribution)
   Examples: Envirosell & UPS

Using these four marketing areas, your four-step goal is to create:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Desire
4. Action

WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

Creativity is about ideas and concepts. You are a product of what your mind digests. If you want to be creative, fill your mind and surround yourself with a broad scope of excellence. Here is what the experts say:

When we remember something, that memory feels unified, but the reality is that you assemble each memory out of lots of different pieces. A tip-of-the-tongue state occurs when one of the pieces gets lost.
- Daniel Schacter :: Psychologist :: Harvard

When you need to tie together things that are distantly related, that’s exactly what an insight is. It’s tying together information that people already know, but they don’t recognize how they are related until that key moment.
- Mark Jung-Beeman :: Neuroscientist :: Northwestern University

Problem solving, whether creative or methodical, doesn’t begin from scratch when a person starts to work on a problem. His or her pre-existing brain-state biases a person to use a creative or a methodical strategy.
- John Kounios :: Psychology Professor :: Drexel University

New insights come from new people and new environments — any circumstance in which the brain has a hard time predicting what will happen next.
- Fast Company

Breakthrough insights are at the intersection of ideas, concepts, and cultures.
- Frans Johansson :: The Medici Effect

3 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE CREATIVE MARKETING

Creativity for creativity’s sake is worthless. Creative marketing must be effective and preferably efficient. Here are three essential steps:

1. Know your brand.
   What makes you unique? What is your mission? What are your core values? etc.
2. Understand culture.
   Understand the cultures of the people you want to reach and how those cultures are evolving.
3. Determine the best marketing route.
   There are hundreds of ways to connect your brand with your audience, but you need to determine which one will be most effective.

JUST THE BEGINNING

There is so much more research and best practices on each area that I have briefly discussed. If you are serious about being a creative marketer, deepen your studies and practice it.