5 Keys to Creativity

Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. Why, no,” dead-panned Red. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

—Walter Winchell

We link creativity to talent, but blogger Greg Satell insists "talent is overrated" and says the least talented among us can find the keys to creativity. For Satell, they are:

Habit. Rain or shine, Satell writes every day. A friend calls it , “Letting the muse know you’re serious.”

Experience. Satell brings a wealth of experience in different businesses, countries and cultures to his writing. "That gives me a lot of raw material to work with."

Productivity.  "The more work you produce the more likely you are to come up with something truly creative," Satell says. "The more you produce, the more skilled you become and the more you can experiment with different combinations."

Serenity. Writer's block can be overcome by finding a distraction that calms your mind. Exercise, walks, coffee with a friend, reading or movie-watching all work.

Compromise. "When you start something it’s always crap," Satell says. "I dare to be crap, knowing that it really doesn’t matter what my first draft looks like." It's easy to fix a first draft, he says. "The only problem that can’t be fixed is a blank page."

Its Takes a Crisis

A brief summer break just took me to Cape May, New Jersey, where a 100-foot canal cuts a 3-mile swath between the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay.

As I experienced on the trip to and from Cape May, you can't drive 10 miles on the East Coast today without delays due to some random road-, bridge- or tunnel-repair project poking along at a snail's pace. 

The Cape May Canal reminds me it takes a crisis to move Americans.

The canal had boosters as far back as 1841 (the riptides around Cape May are treacherous); but no work was begun until 1942, when Nazi submarines lurked beneath the Delaware Bay, targeting American ships. 

After the subs sank a few the year before, FDR okay'd the dig, to give ships a waterway around the subs.

Construction by the Army Corps of Engineers started in August and wrapped up seven months later.

Today, Americans tackle public projects with the vigor of garden slugs. 

Other countries complete roads, bridges and tunnels in the time it takes our governments and contractors to arrange the preliminary bid meeting.

How to Win Friends and Influence Prospects

"Attention is something that can't be refunded or recalled," Seth Godin says. "Once it's gone, it's gone."

Most salespeople fail to realize how fleeting and fragile attention is.

If a prospect won't reply to emails, return calls, accept appointments or keep them, it means you haven't created enough interest to earn her attention.

Here are five sure-fire ways to correct that:

• Get referred. Leverage your network. Ask an influencer to smooth your way.

• Call early. Cold call before the morning madness starts (or late in the evening, when it's past). Be ready to stimulate thoughts. 

• Send a letter. Provoke thoughts the old-fashioned way. Close by asking for an appointment.

• Send a gift.The right one will earn more attention than it deserves. Try a new dollar bill.

• Go where the prospect goes. Use common sense and a little detective work to learn which events the prospect attends. Button-hole her there. Again, be ready to provoke thoughts.

Storytelling: Born in a Bathtub

As a marketing strategy, storytelling was born in a bathtub.

The year was 1951. Stories couldn't move merchandise, the Madison Avenue experts agreed.

Then an obscure shirtmaker from Maine, Hathaway, approached an equally obscure ad man, David Ogilvy, with only $30,000 to spend.

To win him over, the company's president pledged never to fire Ogilvy or change one of his ads.

Ogilvy had been mulling the notion that "story appeal" could sell products, and decided to test the theory with his new client's ads. 

He was sitting in his bathtub when the image of the Hathaway Man came to him.

Ogilvy appeared in the office the next day and instructed his art director to find a model who resembled novelist William Faulkner, who'd recently won a Nobel Prize, for the photo shoot. 

En route to the shoot, Ogilvy bought a 50-cent eyepatch at a Manhattan drugstore. He handed the eyepatch to the photographer and said, "Humor me."

Ogilvy's copy assured readers Hathaway shirts—like the men who wore them—were "in a class by themselves." 

"You will get a great deal of quiet satisfaction out of wearing shirts which are in such impeccable taste."

Ogilvy's first ad in the series ran in The New Yorker. Within a week, every Hathaway shirt in Manhattan was sold. "We have never seen anything just like it," said the magazine's ad manager.

The Hathaway Man soon catapulted the company to the top-ranking shirtmaker in the world—and storytelling to the top drawer in every marketers' toolchest.

Brevents Face Tight Marketing Budgets

Event producers in the UK on average spend only $10,697 to market a B2B event, according to a new survey by Eventbrite.

That amount is paltry compared to a US producer's average marketing spend, which is 28 times greater.

Brits spend the majority of their marketing money on outbound email. 

They also rely heavily on word-of-mouth to draw attendees, the survey finds.