Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [196]
Idea diversity can also be gained by soliciting advertising ideas from various stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers, or employees. I expect that much could be gained by developing procedures for listening to these people and deciding what actions might help.
Generate creative ideas
Many creative discoveries result primarily from the efforts of one person. Anecdotal evidence abounds. For example, Farnsworth invented the television, while RCA was unable to do so. Major companies have rejected inventions by such individuals as Steve Jobs, Chester Carlson, and Bill Bowerman (which led to Apple, Xerox and Nike, respectively). Great books, paintings, music, and architecture are created by individuals, not by committees. David Ogilvy said, “Commercials should never be created in a committee … advertising seems to sell most when it is written by a solitary individual.”
When people get together in groups, creativity is suppressed. My guess is that the lifespan of a creative idea in a traditional group meeting is about a minute. Imagine how creative Benjamin Franklin would have been had he worked in one of today’s large organizations.
Group productivity also drops because of “social loafing.” People in groups tend to slack off, especially when they expect their co-workers to perform well. A meta-analysis of 78 social-loafing studies supported this belief (Karau and Williams 1993).
Dave Barry, the humorist, was serious when he wrote in 1998: “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’”
Many well-respected advertisers, including George Lois, have had little love for meetings. Shirley Polykoff, a noted advertiser at Foote, Cone & Belding, wrote that in the 1950s, “big agencies … specialized in weekly staff meetings of monumental monotony.”
If you cannot eliminate meetings, limit the number of people who attend them. In the 1960s, Bill Bernbach formed teams consisting only of a copywriter and an art director. In the early 2000s, it was common for advertising agencies in London to hire two-person teams (White 2004). And keep meetings short. Some firms use stand-up meetings as a way to keep them brief.
While meetings with clients are necessary, they frequently thwart creativity. In 1962, Bill Bernbach told the Avis CEO, Bob Townsend, “You must promise to run everything we write, without changing a bloody comma … we don’t like to see it get all mucked up in committees. When good advertising goes up there, it gets uncreated.” But when Townsend saw the “We try harder™” campaign, he thought it was awful and considered canceling it (Glatzer 1970). Fortunately for him and for Avis, he didn’t. Avis was still using the slogan as of 2009.
An alternative to in-person meetings is to allow people, especially those in creative jobs, to work independently, while remaining able to benefit from the suggestions of others. Memos and the Internet can provide efficient meeting substitutes. In some cases, face-to-face meetings are necessary-when negotiating, for example. However, when creativity and problem solving are important, face-to-face meetings are typically detrimental, as shown by evidence that I summarized (Armstrong 2006).
Here is a study on creativity in product development. A survey was conducted of 155 firms in the U.S. optics industry, with a follow-up survey on 73 of these firms. Because some firms were located near each other, they had more face-to-face communication, Other firms were more geographically distant; therefore, they relied primarily on e-mail communication. Those who relied less on face-to-face meetings had more creative new products and faster development times. However, the authors also noted the importance of developing strong personal ties; for example, initial face-to-face meetings can play a useful role (Ganesan, Malter, and Rindfleisch 2005).
Problem statements
Solving a problem simply means representing