Wunch upon a time in class, my teacher divided the whiteboard in two and drew an S shape on both sides.
Steven and I were picked. Armed with whiteboard markers, we had to race the clock and each other to turn it into something original.
Look at those 10-year-olds go!
I was confident I’d win. I had a steadier hand! Kids told me I was good at art!
Steeeeven was good at rugby scrums and touchdowns and had boy germs.
I drew a snake on my side of the board. It had perfect proportions and a respectable pattern on its scales.
I LOST.
I can’t even remember what Steven drew. Not a boring snake, at least. I do remember feeling shocked, and learning very quickly that the obvious idea is not the most original.
And that the original idea, even if it wasn’t artistically polished, will have 30 kids ooohing and the teacher giving Steven a prize.
I mean c’mon, “S for snake”???
It’s only been thrashed in every Alphabet-For-Babies book ever. WHAT WAS CHILD-ME THINKING, MY REPUTATION WAS ON THE LINE. If only I could go back in time and turn that S into Kim Kardashian sitting on the edge of a paddling pool or something.
Whatever! Steven can have his dumb prize I don’t even -- is Steven why I am so obsessed about creativity?
CrEaTiViTy.
I don’t just mean artistic. You can be skilled with a brush but have no original ideas about what or how to paint.
I like Sir Ken Robinson’s definition: “the process of having original ideas that have value.”
Or “creativity is problem solving – with relevance, and novelty.” - Stefan Mumaw.
Novelty. Originality.
Those words are not about brush strokes, they’re about ideas.
Creativity is a way to think. In my observation, it is both a gift (you’re good at it from young) and a skill (you can improve it with practice).
Praps that’s why the phrase “we are all creative!” is both true and false: we all have the faculties to be creative, but for some it’s more instinctive.
Anywho, I’m gonna try and break open that mystery.
I’ll fail, because greater minds than mine have made careers out of trying to convert creativity from an abstract blessing into a wikiHow recipe. But this is a topic that we all need to poke our noses into more, even if we drop a few eggs on the floor in the process.
Why?
There are zillions of reasons the world needs more creative thinking. But its purpose in business and marketing is to be the golden goose that helps you stand out in a sea of other choices.
If you stand out more, you’ll get noticed by most of the people who come across your advertising and content. You don’t have to blow the budget in order to get enough people to notice you, and people begin to share your message free of charge because of its novelty.
Plus, if you innovate products faster than your competition instead of just switching things up after they have, you can charge more and own a bigger piece of Market Share pie.
Whether you struggle to come up with original ideas, easily do but would like to communicate that skill to others in your team, or kinda do but it’s “just a fluke” so you always fumble through the process and fret about deadlines… I’ve got ya back.
We’re gonna demo
how to use something as inspo without ripping it off, featuring a famous Thanks For Purchasing email
how to pose a question so your brain knows what to solve
a non-forgery version of a Thanks For Purchasing email.
Why there’s a bee in my bonnet
I was that kid in school who couldn’t submit her math paper on time because she was busy finishing her art competition piece.
To be fair I’d usually started it the night before and was scrambling to finish it on the bus ride to school.
Seriously, one time I had a wet canvas in the locker room and was sneaking out of class to put the last bits of paint in place.
My entries weren’t exemplars of craftsmanship, perfect paint strokes, or tested technique. The only time of year I got artsy was if some event like an art comp was on.
But I loved finding an idea.
Anyway, somebody suspected it was going to nab the big prize, cos when I snuck out of class to finish it FOR REAL THIS TIME, there was a dirty great shoeprint on it.
Maybe that's a conspiracy theory, but I suspect it was intentional because the canvas had been sitting against the wall, not in the middle of the floor… and was HUGE, colourful, and unmissable.
The silly sabotager hadn’t checked which areas of the canvas were wet, though, so had stood on dried paint. A bit of wet-paper-towel-to-the-rescue later, I entered it into the competition. Who knew paper towels had other uses besides throwing at the ceiling?
I shoulda left the shoe print on there and titled it: “Haters Back Off”; acrylic, dirt, and guilty vibes on canvas.
Somebody somewhere gnashed their teeth to sleep that night, and vengeance was mine.
Well, I was probs gnashing my teeth, too.
School creativity competitions grated the zest out of me, because you weren’t just competing against other students. You were competing against a design plagiarised from the World Of Wearable Arts book, or kids who copied from a celebrity cake designer and got their mum to make 99% of it.
I don’t know if it occurred to them it might be cheating. For some people, winning justifies it. But I was a purist about originality… you can be inspired, but don’t “copy”. I woulda rather DIED with my 17-year-old integrity intact 😑
LOL, what’s new…
I got into the copywriting space.
(Why is writing for the world of commerce called copywriting? It confuses everybody because it’s one letter short of copyrighting. Sigh).
I mighta figured out why they include the word copy, though 😏
It is extremely common for copywriters to “swipe” other writers’ words and structures. They almost pride themselves on changing just enough words to pass the plagiarising software test.
I get why they’re doing it: the goal in business is not to be the most original, just profitable.
For many companies, innovation and originality are important ingredients in making sure they get a good helping of dough, but it’s not the GOAL.
So if a sales argument or structure has raked in millions for one brand or product, it’s likely going to perform well applied to other niches or brands.
But there are 3 big flaws in this thinking:
Me-too marketers ruin everything. They see something that works, jump on the bandwagon, slap it with the “best practices” label, and then wonder why its effectiveness wanes. The wider market becomes immune to the template. It becomes “common practice” and then “such-and-such practice is DEAD!” and then “but look at THIS new best practice!”… And thus, the circle of swipes.
If we don’t cultivate creativity as a skill, always opting to grab fruit from the neighbour’s tree cos the branch kiiiiinda hangs over our side of the fence… we’re going to STARVE if they cut it down. We’ve never learnt how to plant and grow our own. Whereas if you’re breaking rules and tinkering to find new ways of marketing, you’ll find better, undiscovered ways. You’ll have an Eden in your backyard.
Our species is going to die out. Haha, no but… I hear copy-swipers worrying about AI taking their jobs. What job? Stealing isn’t a job, it’s a crime. But also, AI is only as good as its programming. If we conclude that what Claude Hopkins wrote in 1988 is the best a brand can get, and don't push our own potential, the walls close in. Like that guy at the patents office in 1899 who said, "everything that can be invented has been invented." AI needs things to fit in boxes. By constantly flexing your creative faculties, you stay out of the box, and out of AI’s clutches.
I’m not saying don’t borrow. But…
What if we strive to use the FOUNDATION of why something works, instead of just slapping the final version into our own marketing?
Let’s do an example!
This thank-you email from CD Baby got shared to the point of going viral and then, yep, swiped. The number of brands that have copy-pasted this could break the internet.
Not bad for 20 minutes of writing.
A lot of marketers use the following parts as inspo swipe:
The idea of the team talking about you and over-the-top celebrating
The idea that the product was handled like royalty
Hyperbole to the point of sarcasm
Specific details to help readers visualise
The entire thing word for word, just replacing the names and nouns with their own. I’m getting my police dog onto them 🙄
But if we go back to the foundations:
Derek wanted to make his customers smile
He wanted to do something different because thank-you emails are usually dull.
Now, remember these guys? I reviewed their emails one time…
I didn’t order my Golden jandals online, so I haven’t seen if/what Golden is emailing customers after a purchase. But I’m going to use their brand (again) to demo…
How to use inspiration and foundational principles to find an original idea, rather than outright duplicating.
First, we brainstorm. Come up with at least 10+ ideas for the following, and don’t censor them because they’re stupid, impossible, or not profitable. Just get your brain going.
To do this we need to rephrase the question like so:
“How could we make our customers smile? How could I let them know we’ve got their order and appreciate them, in an unusual way?”
Let’s jot:
Send them an actual personal email that’s different for each customer
Give them a call
Make the email look like a physical thank-you card
Snap a really rough pic of the warehouse person holding their order slip, and email it
Email a link to a live feed on your website that shows the name of the order being packed right now, and the next 4 in line, sorta like a pizza shop display screen
Email story about how everyone is coming back in after 5 PM to do your order cos you’re such a big deal
An email that includes a secret about the product not revealed before
An email that includes how many units have been ordered to date/a live counter
The email is from point of view of a warehouse team member
The email is from point of view of a fellow avid fan, vying for top-fan position with this customer
You might think that you’d start running out of ideas, right? Well… then you will…!
But all you have to do to come up with more ideas is add more restrictions.
E.g: 10 ways to thank them for their order without using email; 10 ways to thank them for their order using email but not allowed to actually use the words thank you; 10 email ideas that seem like a thank-you but are actually designed to get them to reply so that the spam filters fall in love with your emails and never send you to the junk folder…
The interesting thing about our list of 10? You could keep listing more, or develop each of those in detail to improve them, or you might find sleeping on it blends them into one idea.
Play, walk, dance, snooze, eat… let yourself be anything but in a panic, and your subconscious brain will keep finding novel ways to answer the question you originally fed it.
What I ended up with, then we’ll reverse engineer it:
Hey, where would that link go? To a little VIP surprise:
I’d set up a hidden page on the website where they can plug their own name into the certificate.
Wait, why all the effort for a thank-you?! Shouldn’t we use the creative ideas at the start of the funnel, to ATTRACT customers?
Well, why not give people a unique experience all the way through? It’s not like there’s a shortage of potential original ideas, forcing you to ration them… right?!
Plus, email platform Klaviyo found that post-purchase messaging sees a 217% higher open rate, over 500% higher click rate, and 90% higher revenue per recipient than your average email campaign.
Well well well! Like a momma bird chewing up worms to vomit at her babies, this is a great place to nurture your customers beyond their expectations.
Time to reverse engineer…
I wondered if some of the straight-faced, self-deprecating humour we see from the founder (Jordan Watson) could flip what CD Baby did. Instead of a world where everything goes right, and a choir of angels sing backing vocals, we create shambles.
But it stays optimistic – the customer is still the centre of our world, and our product is still revered.
Did you notice how many other themes from our list blended themselves in?
Send them an actual personal email morphed into: send them a personalized certificate
Everyone coming back after 5 PM to do your order became: everyone still being there after dark due to the chaos
A secret about the product not revealed before evolved into: a secret website page quietly reserved for new customers
Writing from the warehouse team member's point of view became a key idea. But Jordan is the face of Golden, so I made the whole team involved in despatch and wrote it from his perspective. You want to use your new/small startup vibe to make people rally around you!
This isn't lying, it's creative liberty. We're using hyperbole (exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally). It doesn't matter if it's a fact that all of the team are involved in shipping orders or not.
If you remember my review of Golden’s Christmas promo email, their version had a line: “The Stop Premature Blowout Fraternity”. So I amplified that idea by creating a literal (albeit, fake) fraternity certificate.
Mmmk… now let’s look at what ideas we borrowed from the CD Baby inspo?
I don't know what Golden’s office, shipping arrangements or staff names are. This was a demo after all. But also, one of the inspired ideas was: help readers visualise using specific details. Tick.
The idea of the team talking about you and over-the-top celebrating: in our scenario, the team was in meetings and excited to get things shipped ASAP. It had a different format and brand feel, though.
Hyperbole to the point of sarcasm, but more self-deprecating and relatable.
All without swiping entire sentences or paragraph structures! *gasp*
And we made our (pretend) customers smile, and we were different. Kidding… this was a demo, we can’t know that. But you see how starting with foundational principles lead us to an original idea.
Oh, and here are my RuLeS fOr CrEaTiViTy 😉
Don’t trust your first idea. It’s probably everyone else’s first idea, too. The amount of times someone has suggested Hey! What about blah blah?! Stoked with their genius and ready to start the project… unaware that the reason it was so easy to connect the two things that formed that “new" idea is because those things are already connected. It ain’t original, even if it felt new to you. So, brainstorm or mull first. If it remains the best idea, and a quick search shows it hasn’t been thrashed, go fer. Or, suffer a “Steven won” moment at scale.
Don’t develop the entire thing in one sitting. Know when to put pressure on and when to take a break. Boredom and rest are good for the creative brain.
Imagine the idea in its most minimal form and its most perfect form. In the real world, we usually have to be OK with a compromise due to time, capabilities, and budget. Imagining both extremes helps you to make any version of it doable, which makes you less emotionally attached, and more likely to launch and finish. You’d rather the perfect idea become the will-walk-again creature than the dead-on-arrival dream.
Use your laptop to research and edit, but pen and paper to brainstorm. You’re trying to make a mess at first, and digital tools aren’t fluid enough. They want you to correct your spelling and fix the formatting and look at this notification when you’re just tryna braindump. Also, something happens in your brain when you go offline. I don’t know if it’s proven for creativity, but I suspect it’s similar to how we retain notes better if we write them down using a pen, rather than type them.
By no means am I writing from a place of guru-ship or settled science. My opinions are still in an incubator.
I just think there aren't enough tangible discussions about creativity. And in a marketing world full of short-term, technical growth tactics, it'd be great to see originality take the lead.
I’d LOVE to hear about your own creative tools and methods, or how you used this infumashun.
Now, go frolic in the tall grass, it’s good for your brain!
Clippity clop off I hop,
Bernadette.
Whiteboard-Drawing Contest Silver Medalist
Hey. Don’t forget to share this with someone you care deeply for or even just feel neutral toward. Share button just a short scroll away 🔽
Hey again. Want some fun homework?
The most watched TED talk of all time is about how schools stomp out creativity. The presentation is as funny as stand-up comedy, and actually thought-provoking. No offence to 90% of modern TED talks.
John Cleese's presentation about creativity is full of gags and tricks, or grab his easy-read book. He’s the Monty Python guy.
Creative Director Stefan Mumaw shows you how to get to your best ideas faster.
And if you made it this far, see you in another issue where we’ll talk about how to create experiences that delight your customers, like a fake fraternity certificate might. You’re a great reader, have a refreshment 🍫