Connections and creativity

Steve Jobs famously said, "creativity is just connecting things". I think that's true and is particularly about making unexpected connections.

Of course the more you know the more connections you are capable of and Steve jobs had a particularly interesting set of interests; engineering, technology, design and typography; not to mention buddhism and spirituality.In some ways it's no surprise to see the connections he made.

Our ability to be creative is largely driven by what we know and how we link it up.

Steve Jobs went on to say "When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."

So here are a few examples of ideas created by connections using the good old-fashioned what do you get if you cross gag:

In the film industry connecting very different films yields new ideas. Qu: What do you get if you cross Jaws with Close Encounters? A: Alien.

Many entrepreneurs claim to have no original ideas but often they pass the connections test. They take two ideas from two different sectors and put them together. Qu: What do you get if you cross a wholesaler with a corner shop? A: A supermarket.

And great scientific breakthroughs often follow the same rule. Qu: What do you get if you cross genetic identity with forensic fingerprint technology? A:DNA fingerprinting.

Qu: Or advertising ideas crossed with graffiti? A: Ask Banksy.

So if you want to think more creatively a good starting point is to start making connections between the things you know about. As Steve Jobs said "creativity is just connecting things".

Business is prediction

Most business decisions are about prediction: predicting the outcome of an action. In advertising we present ideas that we predict will achieve an objective.We then explain why we think our prediction will come true and the Client either agrees and goes ahead or disagrees and doesn't. If we go ahead our prediction is either proved wrong or right. And that pretty much sums up not just the advertising business but life itself.

Politicians present policy and predict the outcome, investors do the same. And in everyday life we are constantly doing the same thing with every choice we make. The jobs we take, the places we live, the things we buy, the schools we choose.

Humans are predictive by nature. One of the main reasons we have been successful as a species is that we have this ability; to play out scenarios and predict the outcomes of our decisions. It gives humans a huge survival advantage.

The more surprising thing is why we are generally so bad at it. Even with the resources and technology we have today, in every field our ability to predict often falls woefully short.

The reason is simple although none of us really like to accept this: the world is "probablistic". We want forecasts to be accurate and we blame predictors when they are not but they never will be because the world is probablistic.

At best we can hope to be right more often than others. Lie detectors predict correctly about 65% of the time, DNA tests do better, weather forecasting is pretty amazing but still goes horribly wrong quite often, economists? ( need I say more ). And in advertising? All I can say is that those that are good at it are right more often than they are wrong but they will never be right all the the time.

So, a good philosophy, "The universe is probablistic. Humans are predictive. The two don't go together very well. So do your best to make decisions based on all of the information you have and your amazing brain. But don't expect to get it right all the time."

Bertrand Russell's Ten Commandments

"Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness."

Brand mum

Brands are the currency of capitalism but more than that they simply reflect the way the brain makes sense of, and simplifies the world. Basically the brain makes connection and builds concepts around those connections, labelling them with a name. If we ignore the commercial nature of most brands and take the idea of "mum", let's call it "brand mum".

From the moment we are born we start making connections around "brand mum" and although each of us have a different actual mum, the concept of mum i.e "brand mum" shares a set of remarkably common values: she cares for me, she feeds me, she cuddles me, she's there for me, she looks after me, she nags me, she nurtures me.

Once "brand mum" is firmly hardwired in our brains we can easily relate to all mums and we set up a series of expectations. We are shocked when we hear about mums that don't behave as we expect, who don't care and who don't nurture and we find it hard to break out of the stereotype that we have for "brand mum".

In many ways this illustrates the power of brands and branding; creating hard-wired meaning from abstract concepts that simplify our understanding of the world. The tricky bit is that once hard-wired, changing that meaning is difficult. More importantly when brands start acting in a way that doesn't sit comfortably with the hard-wired meaning it can create a very negative reaction.

The good, the bad and the relevant

There is an interesting tendency in the marketing world for absolutism. The latest comes with the advent of social media and goes something like this. "In a world where opinion spreads quickly and virally, only good products will succeed. Bad products will be found out."

There is a real truth underlying this but the more interesting aspect is the use of the word 'good'. Humans like good vs bad, it's a very instinctive and culturally accepted concept. But survival be it 'which brands survive' or in the natural world for that matter 'which species survive' isn't really about good or bad, it's about being well adapted to the environment.

Brands that do well are well adapted i.e. they fulfil people's needs, wants and desires. They make a 'promise' to the consumer and either deliver on it or not. In the digital world brands that fail to meet these needs, wants and desires or that fail to deliver on their promises will be found out. And much more quickly than they used to be.

But this has little to do with good vs bad, a concept which has no real place in marketing or for that matter evolution.

Brands don't need to be good they need to be relevant.

What a piggy bank can tell us

Humans are tricky things. We think one thing and do another. We often say what we don't think. And we like to think we know what we're doing, at least most of the time.

Sadly we are prone to all sorts of human fallibility which we carry through millions of years of evolution: instinct, emotion and our primitive brains introduce all sorts of biases and errors in our thinking and our behaviour.

This is no more pronounced than in the difficulty we have with sacrificing short term benefit for a greater long term benefit: this applies to the food we eat, the alcohol we consume, exercise, work, practicing our hobbies, revising in exams and particularly for saving.

So the piggy bank is a product designed perfectly for the human species, based on a simple insight into human behaviour. The piggy bank is successful not just because kids like pigs but because it makes putting money in easier than taking it out. And this rebalances the urge to spend now rather than to save tomorrow.

To beat our urge for immediate reward we need products that swing the balance in favour of the future: a piggy bank for; diet, for fitness, for education, for practice, for charity and for entertainment is what the world needs now.

Poetry or Craft

"You can teach the craft, it's the poetry you can't teach". So said David Hockney about the teaching of art. But the same applies in so many fields; music, arts, architecture and science.

The craft is more obvious to see and many people struggle with conceptual art where the focus is on the poetry. In science too the execution (ie the craft) is so much easier to 'get', everyone understands a nuclear bomb but few can relate to quantum theory, nuclear fission or Einstein's theory of relativity (the poetry).

In advertising the same applies. The execution is much easier to judge than the idea.

Of course the craft is vital, the skill with hand and eye to create a physical thing out of nothing is amazing but the poetry part is the rarer commodity.

The 'poetry' comes from mental creativity, from the ability to think freely and the ability to have a feel for the subject.

The brain systems that deal with the poetry are different from those that deal with the craft and there is no reason to expect that the two go together. We should respect the poets and the craftsman for their skill and be in awe when the two come together in one individual.