Nicholas Ind

Building Brands Together

Co-creation is a rapidly emerging area of research. However, there is a lack of understanding as to how organizations use co-creation to build relationships and generate value. How does participation emerge and what outcomes does it deliver? To generate insight into the co-creation process, we created an online brand community. Our findings show that people participate in a community because it offers them the chance to find fulfillment, to express their creativity, and to socialize. The findings have significant implications for marketing, branding, and research professionals because the research shows that managers have to see participants as integral to the brand.

Inspiration and Creativity

Think of something that inspires you. It could be the scale and spectacle of the Bilbao Guggenheim, the visual appeal of a Bang and Olufsen hi-fi, the highly personalised service of the US retailer Nordstrom or the indulgence of a meal at London’s Bibendum restaurant. Now think what that sense of inspiration does to you. It should excite you, make you feel special and give you a sense of real engagement. This is why creativity is important. It creates a point of difference and builds a bond between a brand and its customers. But just think how often you’re inspired by your relationship with a brand. Probably not as often as you would like. The few positive experiences stand out like a beacon for most of us. This raises the question of why we don’t have more inspired experiences. That is part of the quest of this book: to understand the processes that enable creative and inspired organisations to be innovative (and to understand the barriers that prevent others).

Managing for Creativity

The Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling once said that to get good ideas, ‘you have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1997, p116). More profoundly, the much quoted Pogo the Possum, said in Walt Kelly’s cartoon strip, ‘we are surrounded by insurmountable opportunity’ (cited in Cringely 1996, p297). These two quotations sum up the managerial challenge on creativity, which will be tackled in this chapter and illustrated in the next by the examples of film company Aardman Animations and games company Funcom. Pauling’s aphorism indicates that organisations should generate as many ideas as possible on the principle that there will be a gem or two among them. While a highly creative individual can, by himself, be a significant source of ideas, if the creativity of others is not captured the size of the pool of ideas will be reduced and full use will not be made of the intellectual capital of the organisation. Of cour se, the problem with succes s is managing the results - which brings us to Pogo.

Branding and Creativity

These two words — ‘branding’ and ‘creativity’ — rarely appear together in the literature on either subject. The popular view is that branding is somehow connected with logos, advertising and (in this post-no logo world) manipulation, while creativity is concerned with individual inspiration. Both viewpoints are mistaken. Branding, as we’ll see in this chapter and the next, is about delivering an experience to customers and other audiences, while creativity, as we have argued throughout this book, is about a collective organisational effort aimed at differentiating a company and its products and services. That the two subjects are separate reflects the background of writers and practitioners as well as the tendency to pigeonhole both activities. Our view is that, in an organisational environment, the two are inextricably linked. The brand should define the boundaries of creativity and creativity should help to define (and sometimes extend) the brand.

Aardman and Funcom

The issue that Rocky raises in Aardman’s animated feature film, Chicken Run,1 is how to best manage creativity. In any project of scale there is always the challenge of how to involve, excite and maintain the enthusiasm of a diverse collection of people. This is especially true when the projects are long term, highly detailed and founded on the vision of one individual. It requires clear direction, but also participation. It requires continuous creativity, but also control. And it requires trust, which makes Rocky’s ironic statement about teams, particularly apposite. The task he is setting to a group of chickens is to learn to fly, which of course he knows to be impossible. The chickens believe that Rocky can fly (and thus that they can as well) because one of them has seen him shooting through the air — although the reality is that he is a circus performer who has been fired from a cannon. But the chickens’ desire to escape from their farm, before they get turned into chicken pies, encourages them to believe in the chimera of flight.

Creative Organisations at Work

Creativity is high on the agenda of most managers, yet its realisation is elusive. Such seemingly simple questions as — What is creativity? What can creativity do for our business? How can we be more creative? — create much soul searching. Managers can identify the need to develop new services and ideas but the barriers to achieving them can sometimes appear insurmountable. The tendency is to think this can be resolved by applying tools and techniques: do more brainstorming; more employee engagement schemes; set up independent development teams; change the office space to encourage better interaction. The reality is that these prescriptions are placebos. Tools and techniques work when the culture is supportive. Without context they are simply a veneer.1 This chapter starts to address some of these basic questions, but does so from a cultural perspective. In so doing, it challenges a number of conventional ideas on personal freedom, the need for organisational boundaries and the role the brand has to play in building and maintaining a creative culture.