Corporate Communication: Bigger than beanbags and brainstorms
Using creativity to move your work toward innovation and profit
My assignment: Write a story about creativity and innovation and the role of each in corporate communications. Make it clear the story isn’t about pretty words and even prettier pictures, but about effectiveness. Quote some people who are redefining their communication strategies and delivering some innovative results. Do all that in a way that gets your attention and holds it for the next three pages.
For starters, I need a creative lead.
But that’s the problem. What is creativity, exactly, and how does it really affect your ability to communicate well? If I were to simply avoid writing a creative lead, for example, but the story I told was effective and complete, then who could blame my CEO for thinking creativity is just a waste of my time?
OK, it will never be that black and white (you know by now that you must have a creative lead, for example). But creativity has gotten a bad rap in the workplace, in every department except your own.
That’s because when senior leaders inquire about creativity, they far too often receive communication plans devoid of a real business strategy and full of well-designed publications, flashy Web sites, high-end photography and other “creative” tactics (think t-shirts, bobble-head dolls, stuffed animals, company calendars without any words on them and hand mirrors decorated with the company logo).
Is this what it means to be creative? Does creativity come at the cost of strategic and thoughtful communication plans?
Surely not. And you know that.
But what you may not know is that your CEO and others just like him are starting to pay attention to the words “creativity” and “innovation.” In fact, chief executives are beginning to understand the common-sense power of innovative products, markets, plans, programs and communication tools. They’re meeting on the subject (check out Fortune magazine’s annual convention on innovation—thousands of senior leaders show up every year). They’re reading about it in every major publication from Time to The Wall Street Journal to BusinessWeek. And then they’re wondering why their companies aren’t on BusinessWeek’s Top 20 Most Innovative list.
Maybe that’s why your “creative” idea to produce a hot pink, kidney-shaped, logo-heavy stress ball that’s sure to “engage” employees hurts your credibility with a CEO who now knows the real meaning of creative, innovative communications.
Here’s a lesson for those who need it:
• Creativity is the process of developing new and interesting ideas.
• Innovation is implementing those ideas so they are valuable or profitable. Innovation is, in its purest form, how your company makes money and gets value from creativity.
Perhaps the greatest examples of corporate creativity and innovation can be seen in the auto industry. When Toyota came up with the Prius (dubbed the “green machine”), the idea to create a gas-electric hybrid was creative. The fact that the model now is among the nation’s most popular means it’s innovative. In fact, the car was given The Innovation Award in Energy by The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal named it Innovation Winner in 2004.
New and interesting idea meets market demand.
The auto industry also is well known for its examples of poor creativity and innovation. Chrysler came up with what they thought was the creative TC by Maserati, a model originally intended to replace the LeBaron among a wealthier market. Bad styling, poor mechanics and sticker shock left the car being hailed a “bastard child” among experts.
New and interesting idea (according to the manufacturers) meets market backlash.
Bottom line? If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t innovative, no matter how new and interesting (creative) the idea.
The same can be said for communication.
“Our success lies in the mind of the audience and whether or not we can command their attention,” said Claire Watson, director of communication and translation for Farm Credit Canada. “There’s a huge difference between being effective and innovative. Corporate communication used to be effective and it was just that, the facts. But today, the same rules apply to us as to our advertising counterparts—if our audience doesn’t get the message in a memorable way, and really buy into it, then everything else is academic.”
That’s why Farm Credit Canada’s senior leaders are so highly committed to the company’s innovation efforts, including an innovation Web site for employees, award-winning internal conferences and workshops, highly effective and creative customer experience standards and video programming designed to engage and educate employees. This is in addition to the company’s more traditional publications and annual report.
But perhaps one of the most creative and innovative contributions the communications department has made is their approach to e-mail reduction. It was obvious that many of the 1,000 home office employees were abusing their “all staff” e-mail option, sending birth and retirement announcements, garage sale advertisements and bowling scores to every employee (including the CEO) whenever the mood would strike. Apparently, it wouldn’t be enough to simply limit access to the “all-staff” option, since so many employees seemed to genuinely appreciate this kind of information. A creative solution resulted in real business gains—to the tune of an 85 percent reduction in e-mail. That’s innovation.
“We created an online employee meeting space where birthdays, babies and bowling scores could be posted for everyone to see,” Watson said. “Employees didn’t want to lose that part of our culture, so we designed a Monday morning update on our Web site. If employees have something they feel the entire company needs to know, they simly e-mail that to our department and it’s posted the following week.”
It’s not enough, though, to simply create innovative communication products. Communicators must also facilitate ongoing education about what it means for all employees to work in creative and innovative ways. According to Gerald Haman, founder of the Chicago-based SolutionPeople, it does no good for companies to come up with ideas unless those ideas can be articulated and communicated so employees can understand and act.
“Communicators can help develop a language that allows people to talk about, and get engaged in, creativity and innovation,” Haman said. “Even the accountant whose main job it is to tabulate numbers can bring more meaning to his work, or overcome some of the redundancy of the job, by being more creative.”
Develop a language? Haman’s not talking about those innovation “gurus” who claim their complicated systems loaded with jargon are the only way to encourage consistent creative, innovative results. In fact, he’s suggesting you do what it is you’ve been hired to do—that is, communicate actively. Throw a few verbs into that copy (try, for starters, words like investigate, create, evaluate and activate—words Haman says are proven to encourage more creative thought). Then, define the term for your company by considering four different types of innovation:
• Product innovation—what whizbang does your company make to earn money?
• Process innovation—how can your company manufacture the whizbang faster and more innovatively, and how can every process leading up to final distribution improve?
• Management innovation—is your management team seeking more innovative leadership principles to better engage the makers of the whizbang?
• Marketing innovation—how do you sell a lot of the whizbangs your company makes?
Of course, if employees are going to listen to you as you talk up the language of innovation, you must prove your worth among the “non-creative” departments. From product development to sales, from operations to customer service, it’s up to you to lead creative discussions, encourage innovative problem solving and develop plans that show how creativity supports strategic initiatives—to help create a culture that nurtures and expects innovation. Only then, Watson says, will you earn the respect of senior leaders and be counted on as a strategic partner who can drive the business agenda forward while improving innovation in all four camps.
Haman recommends you begin by creating “dream teams” of people (innovation ambassadors) who can brainstorm together about what has been done before, what could be done in the future and what should be done as soon as possible to improve all of your company’s innovation processes.
“Current corporate structures aren’t always condusive to innovation,” Haman said. “It can be hard to collaborate when you work in a silo. That’s why communicators should take the lead and create cross-functional teams designed to get people talking to each other about what makes their company great and what could make it even better.”
Once you’ve identified a team, brainstorm all the creative products and services your company has developed over the last decade. Consider which processes were most effective, which standards brought the most value and which products sold the most—that’s your innovation history.
“Do something with that information,” Haman said. “If employees can’t see examples of your company’s innovation, they can’t easily understand the concepts and talk about them.”
For example, when Motorola celebrated its 75th anniversary, the company published a book called Man on the Moon. The book showcases pictures of, and information about, innovative products and services throughout the company’s history. It got thousands of people talking about the company, and gave employees a guide for future creativity and innovation.
“When you start talking about your history, you realize some important things about your company’s current potential for bringing value and profit to the world,” Haman said. “A decade ago, when Kraft first started talking about innovation, they were certain their history lacked the creativity that their future needed. However, the first Kraft cheese product was a very creative idea, as was the packaging and the marketing. They just didn’t know how creative they’d already been. Now, they capitalize on their history and use the lessons learned to make the most of their future.”
Haman also recommends introducing question cards into your company lunchroom, physical meeting spaces or online message board to encourage unfacilitated, free form discussion about creativity and innovation. Include questions such as:
• What is innovation in our organization?
• What are some examples of innovative products or services we’ve had?
• What might be some new creative and innovative products and services we could offer?
• How can my job become more innovative and creative?
Of course, none of these innovative new processes will work if your current communication tactics fail.
“Too many people are using conventional messages to get the message of innovation out,” Haman said. “You need to be creative when communicating about innovation.”
It’s almost an understatement to say that Yummy Times, the employee newspaper for Yum! Brands Inc., doesn’t follow the conventional rules of corporate publishing. In fact, it doesn’t seem to follow any rules at all. The design is all over the place with splashes of seemingly random color popping up everywhere. The headlines scream out from the broadsheet-size pages, which are filled with lines and boxes and photos coming at you from every direction.
But Yummy Times does one thing very, very right: It connects with its audience in a way a more traditional and well-designed corporate publication never could.
The paper is the result of a strategic leap of creativity for the communications team at Yum Brands, which owns 34,000 restaurants (including KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver) in more than 100 countries. Faced with the challenge to successfully communicate to a disparate group of restaurant owners, communicators chose to create a new eye-catching specialty publication that attracted employees’ attention and increased readership.
“Creating a company publication isn’t just about throwing a product out there and saying, that’s that,” said Dennis Whittington, associate manager/systemwide communications. “Our publication could not be as effective if it weren’t creative. Sure, we could produce a typical newsletter and include in it the things that editors include because they don’t know what else to do. But our goal has always been to create a fun means of communication that would deliver a sound message.”
And it’s working. Anecdotal evidence and formal surveys prove that readership is up and more important, so is message retention. And talk about creative means of doing the same old thing, Yum Brands communicators designed a reader survey that asks open-ended essay questions, throwing out the traditional 1–5 scale, increasing their response rate and capturing the kinds of in-depth information a numerical system couldn’t.
And then it begins again. Because only after you’ve measured your tactics can you know they were innovative. Your “market” determines effectiveness and that, in turn, defines innovation.
It will never be good enough again to just be creative.
“At UPS, communicators are expected to set up shop and live at this intersection of creativity and strategy,” said Steve Soltis, executive communications director. “We have to have fresh insights and marketable messages that are aligned with corporate strategy. If they don’t, they miss the mark.
“We don’t just create innovation in a vacuum,” he said. “We take the time to pause and reflect and measure and identify what the market conditions are and how communication must change to reach different audiences in new ways. Because in the end, you can have all the creativity in the world and unless you’re aligned to strategy, you’re blowing a lot of hot air.”
Using creativity to move your work toward innovation and profit
My assignment: Write a story about creativity and innovation and the role of each in corporate communications. Make it clear the story isn’t about pretty words and even prettier pictures, but about effectiveness. Quote some people who are redefining their communication strategies and delivering some innovative results. Do all that in a way that gets your attention and holds it for the next three pages.
For starters, I need a creative lead.
But that’s the problem. What is creativity, exactly, and how does it really affect your ability to communicate well? If I were to simply avoid writing a creative lead, for example, but the story I told was effective and complete, then who could blame my CEO for thinking creativity is just a waste of my time?
OK, it will never be that black and white (you know by now that you must have a creative lead, for example). But creativity has gotten a bad rap in the workplace, in every department except your own.
That’s because when senior leaders inquire about creativity, they far too often receive communication plans devoid of a real business strategy and full of well-designed publications, flashy Web sites, high-end photography and other “creative” tactics (think t-shirts, bobble-head dolls, stuffed animals, company calendars without any words on them and hand mirrors decorated with the company logo).
Is this what it means to be creative? Does creativity come at the cost of strategic and thoughtful communication plans?
Surely not. And you know that.
But what you may not know is that your CEO and others just like him are starting to pay attention to the words “creativity” and “innovation.” In fact, chief executives are beginning to understand the common-sense power of innovative products, markets, plans, programs and communication tools. They’re meeting on the subject (check out Fortune magazine’s annual convention on innovation—thousands of senior leaders show up every year). They’re reading about it in every major publication from Time to The Wall Street Journal to BusinessWeek. And then they’re wondering why their companies aren’t on BusinessWeek’s Top 20 Most Innovative list.
Maybe that’s why your “creative” idea to produce a hot pink, kidney-shaped, logo-heavy stress ball that’s sure to “engage” employees hurts your credibility with a CEO who now knows the real meaning of creative, innovative communications.
Here’s a lesson for those who need it:
• Creativity is the process of developing new and interesting ideas.
• Innovation is implementing those ideas so they are valuable or profitable. Innovation is, in its purest form, how your company makes money and gets value from creativity.
Perhaps the greatest examples of corporate creativity and innovation can be seen in the auto industry. When Toyota came up with the Prius (dubbed the “green machine”), the idea to create a gas-electric hybrid was creative. The fact that the model now is among the nation’s most popular means it’s innovative. In fact, the car was given The Innovation Award in Energy by The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal named it Innovation Winner in 2004.
New and interesting idea meets market demand.
The auto industry also is well known for its examples of poor creativity and innovation. Chrysler came up with what they thought was the creative TC by Maserati, a model originally intended to replace the LeBaron among a wealthier market. Bad styling, poor mechanics and sticker shock left the car being hailed a “bastard child” among experts.
New and interesting idea (according to the manufacturers) meets market backlash.
Bottom line? If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t innovative, no matter how new and interesting (creative) the idea.
The same can be said for communication.
“Our success lies in the mind of the audience and whether or not we can command their attention,” said Claire Watson, director of communication and translation for Farm Credit Canada. “There’s a huge difference between being effective and innovative. Corporate communication used to be effective and it was just that, the facts. But today, the same rules apply to us as to our advertising counterparts—if our audience doesn’t get the message in a memorable way, and really buy into it, then everything else is academic.”
That’s why Farm Credit Canada’s senior leaders are so highly committed to the company’s innovation efforts, including an innovation Web site for employees, award-winning internal conferences and workshops, highly effective and creative customer experience standards and video programming designed to engage and educate employees. This is in addition to the company’s more traditional publications and annual report.
But perhaps one of the most creative and innovative contributions the communications department has made is their approach to e-mail reduction. It was obvious that many of the 1,000 home office employees were abusing their “all staff” e-mail option, sending birth and retirement announcements, garage sale advertisements and bowling scores to every employee (including the CEO) whenever the mood would strike. Apparently, it wouldn’t be enough to simply limit access to the “all-staff” option, since so many employees seemed to genuinely appreciate this kind of information. A creative solution resulted in real business gains—to the tune of an 85 percent reduction in e-mail. That’s innovation.
“We created an online employee meeting space where birthdays, babies and bowling scores could be posted for everyone to see,” Watson said. “Employees didn’t want to lose that part of our culture, so we designed a Monday morning update on our Web site. If employees have something they feel the entire company needs to know, they simly e-mail that to our department and it’s posted the following week.”
It’s not enough, though, to simply create innovative communication products. Communicators must also facilitate ongoing education about what it means for all employees to work in creative and innovative ways. According to Gerald Haman, founder of the Chicago-based SolutionPeople, it does no good for companies to come up with ideas unless those ideas can be articulated and communicated so employees can understand and act.
“Communicators can help develop a language that allows people to talk about, and get engaged in, creativity and innovation,” Haman said. “Even the accountant whose main job it is to tabulate numbers can bring more meaning to his work, or overcome some of the redundancy of the job, by being more creative.”
Develop a language? Haman’s not talking about those innovation “gurus” who claim their complicated systems loaded with jargon are the only way to encourage consistent creative, innovative results. In fact, he’s suggesting you do what it is you’ve been hired to do—that is, communicate actively. Throw a few verbs into that copy (try, for starters, words like investigate, create, evaluate and activate—words Haman says are proven to encourage more creative thought). Then, define the term for your company by considering four different types of innovation:
• Product innovation—what whizbang does your company make to earn money?
• Process innovation—how can your company manufacture the whizbang faster and more innovatively, and how can every process leading up to final distribution improve?
• Management innovation—is your management team seeking more innovative leadership principles to better engage the makers of the whizbang?
• Marketing innovation—how do you sell a lot of the whizbangs your company makes?
Of course, if employees are going to listen to you as you talk up the language of innovation, you must prove your worth among the “non-creative” departments. From product development to sales, from operations to customer service, it’s up to you to lead creative discussions, encourage innovative problem solving and develop plans that show how creativity supports strategic initiatives—to help create a culture that nurtures and expects innovation. Only then, Watson says, will you earn the respect of senior leaders and be counted on as a strategic partner who can drive the business agenda forward while improving innovation in all four camps.
Haman recommends you begin by creating “dream teams” of people (innovation ambassadors) who can brainstorm together about what has been done before, what could be done in the future and what should be done as soon as possible to improve all of your company’s innovation processes.
“Current corporate structures aren’t always condusive to innovation,” Haman said. “It can be hard to collaborate when you work in a silo. That’s why communicators should take the lead and create cross-functional teams designed to get people talking to each other about what makes their company great and what could make it even better.”
Once you’ve identified a team, brainstorm all the creative products and services your company has developed over the last decade. Consider which processes were most effective, which standards brought the most value and which products sold the most—that’s your innovation history.
“Do something with that information,” Haman said. “If employees can’t see examples of your company’s innovation, they can’t easily understand the concepts and talk about them.”
For example, when Motorola celebrated its 75th anniversary, the company published a book called Man on the Moon. The book showcases pictures of, and information about, innovative products and services throughout the company’s history. It got thousands of people talking about the company, and gave employees a guide for future creativity and innovation.
“When you start talking about your history, you realize some important things about your company’s current potential for bringing value and profit to the world,” Haman said. “A decade ago, when Kraft first started talking about innovation, they were certain their history lacked the creativity that their future needed. However, the first Kraft cheese product was a very creative idea, as was the packaging and the marketing. They just didn’t know how creative they’d already been. Now, they capitalize on their history and use the lessons learned to make the most of their future.”
Haman also recommends introducing question cards into your company lunchroom, physical meeting spaces or online message board to encourage unfacilitated, free form discussion about creativity and innovation. Include questions such as:
• What is innovation in our organization?
• What are some examples of innovative products or services we’ve had?
• What might be some new creative and innovative products and services we could offer?
• How can my job become more innovative and creative?
Of course, none of these innovative new processes will work if your current communication tactics fail.
“Too many people are using conventional messages to get the message of innovation out,” Haman said. “You need to be creative when communicating about innovation.”
It’s almost an understatement to say that Yummy Times, the employee newspaper for Yum! Brands Inc., doesn’t follow the conventional rules of corporate publishing. In fact, it doesn’t seem to follow any rules at all. The design is all over the place with splashes of seemingly random color popping up everywhere. The headlines scream out from the broadsheet-size pages, which are filled with lines and boxes and photos coming at you from every direction.
But Yummy Times does one thing very, very right: It connects with its audience in a way a more traditional and well-designed corporate publication never could.
The paper is the result of a strategic leap of creativity for the communications team at Yum Brands, which owns 34,000 restaurants (including KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver) in more than 100 countries. Faced with the challenge to successfully communicate to a disparate group of restaurant owners, communicators chose to create a new eye-catching specialty publication that attracted employees’ attention and increased readership.
“Creating a company publication isn’t just about throwing a product out there and saying, that’s that,” said Dennis Whittington, associate manager/systemwide communications. “Our publication could not be as effective if it weren’t creative. Sure, we could produce a typical newsletter and include in it the things that editors include because they don’t know what else to do. But our goal has always been to create a fun means of communication that would deliver a sound message.”
And it’s working. Anecdotal evidence and formal surveys prove that readership is up and more important, so is message retention. And talk about creative means of doing the same old thing, Yum Brands communicators designed a reader survey that asks open-ended essay questions, throwing out the traditional 1–5 scale, increasing their response rate and capturing the kinds of in-depth information a numerical system couldn’t.
And then it begins again. Because only after you’ve measured your tactics can you know they were innovative. Your “market” determines effectiveness and that, in turn, defines innovation.
It will never be good enough again to just be creative.
“At UPS, communicators are expected to set up shop and live at this intersection of creativity and strategy,” said Steve Soltis, executive communications director. “We have to have fresh insights and marketable messages that are aligned with corporate strategy. If they don’t, they miss the mark.
“We don’t just create innovation in a vacuum,” he said. “We take the time to pause and reflect and measure and identify what the market conditions are and how communication must change to reach different audiences in new ways. Because in the end, you can have all the creativity in the world and unless you’re aligned to strategy, you’re blowing a lot of hot air.”
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