Established successful teams still need injections of creativity

So much of what we do in events marketing is dependent upon both, good team work and fresh ideas. Inspired thinking maintains the interest, engagement and memorable impact of events.

Conversely, a stable well-established marketing team is like a well-oiled machine. Unfortunately, a well-established team has a history, procedures, expectations and processes which define what they do!

Corporate marketing departments need both the well-oiled team but also the injection of new creative ideas if success is going to be maintained.

Corporations have rules and procedures. From financial and budget processes to marketing guidelines and restrictions. A team with years of cooperation will naturally be more efficient than a team with regularly changing staff. An effective, structured and established team creates for itself “a box”.

Events need creative change. Marketing itself is dependent upon being different, and events have the same need. So experience from outside the current environment is a significant contributing source for being different. Creativity needs thinking from outside “the box”.

Ideas alone don’t happen, they must be made to happen!

Getting ideas from other sources is super. Still the experience needed to implement the idea can make or break its suitability. In addition, the consequences and integration of an idea into a theme or whole can also be difficult without the mental exercise of checking implications.

So often marketing departments are expected to do something new, special and memorable, but with less budget than before. The combination of increasing requirements, decreasing budget and an established in-house team increases the probability that a corporation’s events will stagnate.

Stagnation not only limits the effectiveness of the sales team at events, it also impacts the personal development and motivation of the marketing team. Staff in a marketing team, like any other employees, stay with a company because there is something new to learn or something new to do.

Over time, with limited budget and no prospects of something new, the well-oiled machine may well start to disassemble itself. If professional marketing people can’t perform their profession, they will go somewhere where they can!

So the intellectual property aspect of experience is a marketing asset too!

Event agencies are sometimes seen as extra “workforce” to fill in for staff loss or overwork, but they are more. The experience agencies have with other clients, other industries or indeed other cultures, is an asset in itself.

This intellectual property asset is so often missed by corporations that are under pressure. It should be exploited.

Corporations today often have procedures for marketing departments requiring that the event, resources and costs are all predefined and justified before budget is released. Yet without a “thinking budget” to bring in outside contributions to the brainstorming phase, the proposals will be less inspiring and less dynamic.

Tapping the rich resource of external experience is more important today, because of the web and social media. The web and social media provide an environment which gives prospects the feeling of access to information and interaction, when in fact a dialogue is often essential.

As a result it is getting harder to get attendees to events, capture their attention and retain some level of interaction. Creating a desire for attendance is important as events are the only true environment where prospects can meet sales people and enter into a genuine dialogue.

So even when the in-house staffing levels are sufficient, the in-house open mindedness may not be. Injecting a bit of “outsider thinking” may be all you need, even if only to leverage the latest budget cut.