How to cultivate a creative culture in your startup — Animaker’s style.

If you’re serious about creative marketing, the first thing you need to do is build a creative marketing culture. Because only a creative team can come up with creative ideas and execute creative campaigns.

But Sadly, the current workforce lacks creativity. So who is to blame for that? Is creativity an anomaly in human evolution?

Not Really!

Every human being is born creative. Ken Robinson in his latest TED talk, says that children are naturally creative. Then we educate their way out of it. Why? Because back in the 20th century, the major revenue driving sector was the manufacturing sector which trained human beings to be workers who obeyed. Free thinking had to be killed and the factory system of education was born.

Problem is, we are still stuck with the factory system of education. And now, that the digital revolution is happening we need a creative workforce to cope up with the upcoming challenges.

You can’t do much with the schools around. So the best you can do as a company, is to build an environment which brings back the lost creativity from each individual.

This is exactly what giants like Google and Facebook are doing. They understand that if the decisions taken by each and every individual is creative, it will reflect in the services they provide as well!

To understand this better, let’s examine a company which has one of the best creative cultures in the world — Pixar!

​Pixar’s secret to a creative culture

We all know what Pixar is but don’t brush them off as mere movie making companies. They actually make the kill selling merchandise. The movie just acts as content!

Their box office hit movie Cars made a whopping 1.2 billion dollars worldwide. But guess what, they made a revenue of 10 billion dollars selling merchandise alone!!

​You should look at your marketing campaign like how Pixar looks at their movie production. If you get this right, you’ll sell your products like Pixar sells merchandise!

In Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc, he explains how exactly he built Pixar with creativity at its heart. These are the key takeaways:

1. It starts with leadership: Every CEO needs to think like a Chief Creative Officer and every content marketer should strive to become a creative marketer.

2. Get the team right: It’s not just about getting talented people. It’s about getting a team with good chemistry! Ideas do not come from one person. More often than not, ideas are shaped by a group of creative people.

3. Instill Confidence: By supporting your team members even when things fail, they’ll have the loyalty to come up with creative solutions.

4. Go Regularly on Trips: Try to take your team to face some sort of a challenge. When they are exposed to unexpected situations it’ll force them to be creative. It even increases their Creativity Quotient BIG TIME!

How you can build a creative marketing culture

Remember, your aim is to create a culture that increases the overall creativity quotient of your company. Here are a few routines you can follow to create and cultivate a creative culture:

Solve problems with ‘5 Why’ questions

Asking ‘WHY’ questions is one of the most powerful ways to spark creativity. Because it gets people’s minds into a problem-solving state rather than a problem-focused state.

But why ‘5 why’ questions? Well, you can ask many questions as you like but after a stage, it keeps on going like a UNO game. So I always keep it down to 5.

Lets see how it works in real time. Say you have a drop in sales this week. Here’s how you can question it:

1) Why did the sales drop?

Ans: The salespeople haven’t been productive this week.

2.) Why were the salespeople unproductive?

Ans: They had less number of leads to process over the week.

3.) Why did the sales team have less no. of leads?

Ans: The marketing team didn’t run any lead generation campaigns this week.

4.) Why didn’t the marketing team run any lead generation campaigns?

Ans: The adwords campaign had ended automatically a week before and the team member responsible has forgotten to make it live again.

5.) Why did the team member forget to make the campaign live again?

Ans: The team member had forgotten about the ending day of the campaign.

And Voila! There’s your solution, the team member had forgotten to set a reminder for himself regarding the due date of the campaign and this has resulted in drop of sales. This can be simply solved by using task tracking tools like Asana.

You’ll be surprised to find the solution when you try to solve a problem using the “5 Why questions”.

Turn Challenges into Opportunities

“By turning challenges into opportunities, you will find success you never realised you were capable of achieving.” — Richard Branson

The story of Animaker has been filled with many challenges — but instead of looking at them as dead-ends we have embraced them, and turned them into opportunities.

Even naming Animaker as Animaker wasn’t easy.

Stop Laughing. Start Encouraging!

At Animaker, we believe that humor in the workplace can boost employee productivity, and even enhance their creativity. That’s why we always ensure to have frequent laughter sessions whenever we get the time or opportunity.

But one thing we don’t do is laugh off a team member if their ideas are illogical. But rather we provide them with a positive feedback so that they can rework on their idea and make it kickass.

This is a very important step to follow as part of building a creative culture, because if you laugh at them in the first place, they won’t be comfortable to share their crazy ideas the next time around.

Celebrate both success and failure

In my experience, failure is a good thing and it is really a lesson on the path to success.

But unless you have policies in place to support and celebrate failures, it is futile to expect creativity and innovation from your employees. Here’s how you can embrace failure:

Open kill: This is a culture where people are open to kill, remove a feature from the product or sacrifice 3 months of hard work and still feel proud about it. Because only if you take items off your list, you can focus on the things that really matter.

Recalling a famous Steve Jobs quote “Deciding what not to do is equally important as deciding what to do?”

Open talk: Have a quarterly session where employees can openly talk about their failures and feel proud of it. You can hear stories of miserably failed marketing/sales campaigns or a support person who tried to please a customer in a different way but ended up backfiring, etc.

You can also reward risk-taking by holding your employees accountable for trying a new approach to one of their tasks in each quarter.

These are just some of the ways we use to foster an atmosphere of creativity at our company.

What have you done lately to inspire a creative marketing culture in your startup? Share your story in the comment section below!