This post is part of my bachelor paper ‘The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management’. You can read the introduction, other posts and the table of contents here.

To understand creativity in brand management, one has to first ask what organisational creativity is. In their much-quoted paper Woodman et al (1993, p.293) define it as follows:

“Organizational creativity is the creation of a valuable, useful new product, service, idea, procedure, or process by individuals working together in a complex social system. It is, therefore, the commonly accepted definition of creative behavior, or the products of such behavior (e.g., Arieti, 1976; Barron, 1969; Golann, 1963) placed within an organizational context.”

In this context, creativity is defined as a subset of innovation, which itself is defined as a subset of organisational change. The conceptual links between individual, groups and organisational behaviour are shown in Figure 6 below.

Figure 6: Conceptualisation of Organisational Creativity, taken from Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin (1993, p. 309)

Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin (1993, p.309) conceptualise creativity in an organisational setting along three major categories. Creativity as the trait of individual people is applied in concrete group situations that are formed by organisational characteristics. Individuals, groups and organisations together form the traits of the creative process that then leads to an output. Creativity is here seen as both the trait of an output as introduced in the preceding chapters and as ‘creative behaviour’ in the context organisation. This chapter will focus on the organisational traits that influence the latter.

The history of corporations’ relationship with creativity isn’t necessarily friction-free. Feldwick and Heath (2008, p.29) use the information processing paradigm and the case study of an advertising campaign not at all suited to this paradigm for their analysis of creativity in an organisational context. The TV commercial they refer to contained no information as such about the product and used a pop song and surreally linked scenes to advertise a snack food product. In the subsequent testing of the commercial by market research, questions were asked to measure constructs such as ‘ease of understanding’, ‘believability’, ‘relevance’, ‘branding’ and ‘persuasion’ (ibid.) and the research report then followed with conclusions that are included here in full for better understanding:

“This route does not seem to have worked very well … it hampers understanding and comprehension of intended message.

The song acts as the biggest hurdle – there is a strong element of dislike which overrides message takeout, and impressions about the product.

… the taste, or other details about the product are hardly mentioned spontaneously.

The ad … is seen in terms of its format rather than communication, which results in relevance, believability and persuasion being low. This is also supported by the low ease of understanding score.

We feel it may not be appropriate to use this ad as a launch vehicle, given the above concerns. Probably a more simplistic route (a simple story line) which emphasises the brand name and benefits clearly would work the best.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.30)

To sum it up, research conducted with the information processing model in mind would have recommended not to run the ad, because it doesn’t persuade and doesn’t transfer a message.

“The research was conducted among teenagers using familiar ‘impact and communication’-type questions such as ‘Did this commercial give you enough information about the product?’ and ‘Do you think someone would find this commercial easy to understand?’ From such questions, average scores were produced for constructs including ‘ease of understanding’, ‘believability’, ‘relevance’, ‘branding’ and ‘persuasion’. On all these, scores were below norms.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.29)

Feldwick and Heath (2008) now argue that it is not the research that is unusual in this particular case but the fact that the advertiser ran the ad, for reasons of timing. After it had a chance to be seen in the real world by real people, the campaign was a massive success.

“It became the most recalled and liked ad among teenagers and adults for three months in a row, in an independent survey of all advertising in its geographical market. It achieved high spontaneous recall, with 93% liking the ad very much – especially the song. In fact, the campaign became ‘the talk of the town’ with many mentions in the press, on TV shows, etc. Most importantly, the brand took a substantial share of the market.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.30)

Why, then, was the research done this way? They argue that marketing organisations still hang onto the information processing model, while the majority of advertising practitioners – and academic researchers building on researchers like Krugman (1965) or Kroeber-Riel (1975) – believe that advertising works on an emotional – and not necessarily message based – level. This, in turn, leads to

“a benign conspiracy between client and agency in which creativity and communication are able to coexist (Heath 2004) [and in which] huge resources of corporate ingenuity are squandered in retrofitting successful campaigns to ‘information processing’ strategies. So we are led to believe that Heineken’s famous ‘Refreshes the parts …’ campaign worked mainly because it communicated the ‘benefit’ of refreshment. […] It is a bit like saying that King Lear is a great play because it is about families.” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.32)

If creativity is important and the message perhaps less so, then the question why the information processing model persists. According to Feldwick and Heath (2008) the reason for this has to be looked for in the underlying organisational culture of business. They point out that these cultures are based on “modernist principles of order, control and rationality, with a strong realist ontology and a positivist epistemology (Alvesson & Deetz 2005, p.61)” (p.47). They tend to rely on argument, analysis, measurement and factual proof, “however illusory the practice of these may be” (ibid.). While these practices can be highly effective in administration and the refinement of processes, they are “very badly adapted to dealing with creative processes, with emotional decisions or in general with anything that cannot explicitly be verbalised and/or measured” (ibid.). The information processing model presents the consumer choice behaviour as a rational and fact based process and therefore allows organisations to bring the logic, words and analytical thinking they value so much into an otherwise “chaotic, intuitive” (ibid.) process.

“For the marketing organisation, then, the IP model fulfils a need to remain consistent with the organisational myths of rational decision making, replicability and control. It does this by reducing the essence of the creative content to a single proposition or idea that can be owned, replicated and controlled; by envisaging the communication process as a mechanistic transfer of this unit of information whose efficiency can be measured; and by projecting on to the consumer’s choices the same myth of rational decision making that the organisation values internally.” (ibid.)

Creativity, as an outsourced process and output is attached to a model that appears “simultaneously rational, replicable, ownable and controllable” (ibid.) and is rarely discussed between agencies and clients (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.36). This practise, then, is the same that is also present in many practitioners’ brand management models, that mostly willingly ignore environmental complexity, relationships and communication and present themselves to brand managers as controllable solutions.

Analysing creativity and innovation in corporations beyond advertising and brand management, Martin (2009b) argues like Feldwick and Heath (2008) that corporations are built and managed as a means to guarantee reliability. They have refined and pushed forward analytical thinking – deduction and induction – and each year graduates trained in business administration stream into the corporate world. He describes a paradoxical context in which companies long for strategic innovation while at the same time abductive thinking, the thinking style balancing analytical thinking and intuitive thinking, is still largely ignored (Martin 2009b; Johansson & Woodilla 2009). Operating in the realm of “what might be – a realm beyond the reach of data from the past” (Martin 2009b, n.p.) isn’t what most business are good at, or even trying to do. Martin therefore argues for a balance between the two approaches for more creative results.

“A person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation.“ (Martin 2009b, n.p.)

As argued before with Nussbaum (2011), the results of the design thinking movement so far have been limited, as the topic that this discourse really is about – creativity – has been largely circumvented. A description of the state of creativity in organisations by one of its widely acknowledged researchers reads like this:

“[T]here can be no doubt: creativity gets killed much more often than it gets supported. For the most part, this isn’t because managers have a vendetta against creativity. On the contrary, most believe in the value of new and useful ideas. However, creativity is undermined unintentionally every day in work environments that were established – for entirely good reasons – to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity and control.” (Amabile 1998, p.77)

Amabile (1998, p. 81) also argues that the practices responsible for inhibiting creativity in corporations are systemic, widespread and hardly even challenged and suggests management principles that have shown to bring about higher levels of creativity in the workplace. She suggests that “people will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself – and not by external pressures” (p.79). In general, “challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement, and organisational support” (p.80) are managerial categories that can positively – or negatively – affect the ability of employees who are otherwise knowledgeable and posses creative thinking skills. However, compared to the underlying the culture of business and brand management described by Feldwick and Heath (2008), Martin (2009a) and Nussbaum (2011), Amabile’s (1998) prescriptions for managers appear to be a minor issue in the bigger picture.

In reviewing the role of creativity from a product, process, person and place perspective, a number of conclusions have been drawn. The following, concluding chapter will now merge the findings in the chapter about brand management with those about various aspects of creativity.

—

Alvesson, M. & Deetz, S., 2005. Critical theory and post modernism: approaches to organizational studies. In C. Grey & H. Willmott, hrsg. Critical management studies: A reader. Oxford University Press, USA, , S. 60–106.

Amabile, T.M., 1998. How to kill creativity. Harvard business review, 76(5), S. 76–87.

Heath, R. & Feldwick, P., 2008. Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising. International Journal of Market Research, 50(1), S. 29.

Johansson, U. & Woodilla, J., 2009. Towards an epistemological merger of design thinking, strategy and innovation. In 8th European Academy of Design Conference.

Kroeber-Riel, W., 1975. Konsumentenverhalten, München: Vahlen.

Krugman, H.E., 1965. The impact of television advertising: Learning without involvement. Public Opinion Quarterly, 29(3), S. 349.

Martin, R., 2009a. The design of business: why design thinking is the next competitive advantage, Harvard Business Press.

Martin, R., 2009b. What is Design Thinking Anyway? Observatory: Design Observer. Available at: http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=11097 [Zugegriffen März 14, 2011].

Nussbaum, B., 2011. Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next? Co.Design. Available at: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/beyond-design-thinking [Zugegriffen April 18, 2011].

Woodman, R.W., Sawyer, J.E. & Griffin, R.W., 1993. Toward a theory of organizational creativity. The Academy of Management Review, 18(2), S. 293–321.

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1. 3.2 A Product View Of Creativity In Brand Management
2. 3.3 A Process View of Creativity in Brand Management
3. 3. Creativity In The Context Of Brand Management
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