if your team suck at coming up with creative ideas (just do this)

Paul McCartney was flying First Class to New York. Paul asked the beaming blonde a question. Paul didn’t know this question was going to change his life.

“Please, Nicole, may I have some Salt and Pepper”

Paul opened the Salt & Pepper sachets, from a height, seasoned his steak and garlicky new potatoes and boiled carrots and asparagus.

SUDDENLY, screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaming from the Deep

a flashing-sparkling bolt struck Paul

Howling like Starbust-Eyed Wolves from the Mystic River.

In Wild Alarm, Paul took out his scuffed and bruised-black notepad from his Armani brown leather jacket pocket

With his favourite green and yellow pencil, Paul scribbled down “Sergeant Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band”

The Greatest Album of all time was born.

25 Years later, in Manchester, on a miffed and wet November afternoon.

A man toiled away all the day in the recording studio.

Nothing coming. Nothing happening.

Frustrated, the man nipped and out the back for a ciggy and cuppa by the orange Fire Exit Door.

His cigarette soggy from the pathetic rain, tea vacant. .

UNTIL,

the sky opens. purple-orange-green-yellow sweeties fall

down

from

the

sky.

A charging ZONKING CREATIVE WATERFALL.

The man opened his notepad, capturing the sweeties, nurturing the ideas.

In 32 minutes, Noel Gallagher wrote the lyrics and chords for “Supersonic”.

One of the greatest songs of all time.

(which btw contains the best brand strategy advice of all time “you need to be yourself, you can’t be no one else).

Paul McCartney and Noel Gallagher teach challenger brands tonnes about creativity.

So many founders ask me:

“how can we get our team to be more creative?”
“We want lateral thinkers, MATE”.

Right come here… sit down… have a drink… let’s talk about…

Creative Being vs. Creative Doing

Creative Being = is embracing creativity in every single part of your life.

Creative Doing (i.e. doing the work) = writing the pitch, ideating the merch launch, coming up with the whacky buyer meeting, writing the ATL copy, planning your Taste of London stand.

Let’s use Roger Federer & Tennis to understand Creative Being vs. Creative Doing more deeply.

Creative Being = smashing backhands across court in training, thinking about his serve as he eats his morning oats, visualising him holding the racket.

Creative Doing = going out on centre court at Wimbledon tearing Andy Murray a new one.

now here’s what most people get wrong

Creative Being precedes Creative Doing.
Creative Being precedes Creative Doing.
Creative Being precedes Creative Doing.

Founders want their teams “to be more Creative” (creative doing) yet don’t foster cultures of “Creative Being”

3 Ways to foster Creative Being + improve your teams’ creative output

Creative Being 1

Get a fucking note pad or use iPhone notes.

any idea that comes to your mind build the habit of capturing EVERYTHING.

Good, Bad, Ugly.

capture. capture. capture.
capture. capture. capture.

do this enough times, until it becomes habit.

the goal here is to capture enough creative fodder and material and ideas and quotes.

Then let your subconscious marvellously go to work.

Alas, when you sit down to do the “Creative Doing”.

Ideas will flow to you and through you like yummy lightning bolts from the deep.

One of the most creative brands at the minute is SULT.

Henry put this on his LinkedIn

Creative Being 2:

Notice things. Notice anomalies. Building a noticing muscle is possible.

“The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.” - Paul Graham.

“Central sentence of book “we favour the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated and the tangible, we scorn the abstract” - Nassim Taleb

1. look for anomalies

2. look outside your category for inspiration.

3. look for abstract things in totally different categories

4. different inputs = different outputs.

Creative Being 3:

Creativity is a muscle.

Creativity, like biceps or booty, can be trained, developed, grown, improved.

A fun exercise is to apply Creative Being to your everyday.

Taking seemingly superfluous events and adding little “creative reps” to them.

You’re building the “Creative Being” muscle, so, when you sit down to do the “Creative Doing” everything is easier and lighter.

Some examples.

• Creative Workout: go to the gym and do you normal work out in reverse. Or Pick three different exercises you’ve never done before.
  

• Creative Recipe: picking 5 ingredients from 5 different categories, use your intuition, to create a recipe.
  

• Creative Questions: everyday write down 5 completely random questions about the world. See how they soak into your conscious.
  

• Creative Coffee: make your coffee in a different way. What do you notice?
  

• Creative Commute: get off two stops earlier and walk to work, notice what anomalies you see in the world. Capture them down in your notepad.
  

• Creative Environment: change where you work 3 times through out the day. Gym. Co-working. Coffee House. what do you notice as you change environments?

HUNGRY HOUSE OF CREATIVITY WITH BRAND HACKERS

Right yaaaaaa little beautiful schmucks.
Now, I’m selling to you.

Just launched HUNGRY HOUSE OF CREATIVITY in collaboration with BRAND HACKERS.

Launched this with my brother, self-proclaimed FMCG Nerd, James Hickson who runs Brand Hackers.

James and his team has worked with BrewDog, innocent, Who Gives a Crap, Tony’s Chocolonley, Solo Coffee, Rock Face, The Curators, Heineken (you get the picture)

why we’re doing this?

we deeply believe

10x creativity beats 10x budgets.

Creativity is the oxygen for challenger brand growth
Creativity is a tool, to solve really hard problems

10x your creativity with 10x less budget.

We’ve got three SICK workshops:

CREATIVE STORY - Sales & Storytelling Secrets to unlock supermarket listings

CREATIVE BEING - Creative principles to think outside the box and solve hard problems

CREATIVE BRAND - Brand Positioning & Marketing - how to use creativity to make your brand STAND OUT.

Who’s this for?

big corporates wanting to really understand how challenger brands think.
scaling challenger brands who are looking to rekindle their creative juice.

Who we’ve worked with?

We’ve run these workshops for Vita Coco, Cawston Press, Boundless Snacks, Islands Chocolates, White Mausu.

How to work with us?

Reply to this email and we can set up a call with myself and James.

Love yaaaa’s long time

xxxxx

Still Hungry? Course you are…

Please feel free to gorge on the most downloaded podcast episodes of all time (these are CERTY: BANGERS)

1. Rory Sutherland: Why Challenger Brands Must Never Follow Logic to Truly Disrupt Categories 

2. Waitrose CEO: How Challenger Food & Drink Brands Can Win and Build Profitable Partnerships with Waitrose - James Baile

3. Spencer Matthews: How Spencer Matthews Built Unshakeable Resilience and Raised + £10m to Launch Clean Co. in Sainsbury's, Tesco and the U.S.A. 

4. How Grenade Exited to Mondelez for £200 Million and Lessons in Unapologetic Authenticity- Juliett Baratt

5. Tyrells Tycoon: How William Chase built and sold Tyrells for £50 million and sold Chase Distillery to DIAGEO 

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