I spend a good part of every day innovating. No that’s not a humble-brag, but a reframing of the fact that as marketers, we spend a huge amount of time looking at what is and wondering how we can make it better. That’s innovation.
Innovation is a word that can trigger a host of instinctive reactions and thoughts of ‘that’s for other people’ so I enjoyed this piece from the Innovation SuperNetwork – powered by UMi that reminds us that small businesses and individual teams all have the opportunity to innovate – it just means challenging the way something is done, and figuring out if it can be done differently (and hopefully better!) …and it doesn’t need to have anything to do with technology.
Does your marketing take itself too seriously?
I totally take the point of this article, that a lot of brands need to take themselves less seriously. But I am also still haunted by my sixth-form media studies tutor who cautioned us of all the things we could choose to produce, humour is the hardest to execute. My straight-laced documentary about nature reserves did have a more polished production than all the oddball comedy my peers made…it wasn’t cool though.
Can you be more playful without missing the mark? It makes the need to truly understand our audience even more crucial…
These are serious issues brands are activating around, yet they do so with levity and love, and it works. Why then are so many other brands with less to be weighty about not making the most of what a spot of humour and whimsy in marketing could deliver for them?
Colour play
We’ve been part of a rebrand project recently, and reviewing colour palette options with our design partner started me off on a refresh of the colours in my workspace.
The way my brain works, switching up things like my desktop background and the colours I use in my calendar from time to time keeps me loving my digital workspace. (It can’t be just me?!)
I still recommend working with professional designers for something as important as your brand, but for other projects this tool is great for playing with colour inspiration.
You can generate at random, or choose your own starting colours to produce an expanded palette – think of presentation backgrounds, chart graphics …or colour coding your calendar!
