B Corp Breakfast: Cultivating Creativity in your Marketing Team

Yoyo: Breakfast Briefings

Our Breakfast Briefings are a relaxed and informal gathering facilitated by Yoyo, where marketing people can get together to ask questions, share advice and reignite their own and their team's creative spark.

Joined by marketing professionals across a wide range of B Corps and purpose-driven businesses, we came together at fellow B Corp Runway East in London Bridge to hear different perspectives on infusing creativity within in-house marketing teams.

Why this topic?

It’s all too common in marketing for all of the energy and budget to go into daily firefighting instead of innovation. 

Not having the time or capacity to think strategically or creatively often stops teams from going the extra mile to drive growth. 

Our Founder and Creative Director Gregg Lawrence and our Head of Project Management Hannah Smith facilitated the discussion whilst adding expert opinion through an Agency lens.

Done is better than perfect

'The perfect is the enemy of the good’ is a familiar phrase in the self-improvement sphere, but it applies to marketing projects too. As lovely as it would be to incorporate every single bit of feedback, it’s lovelier still to be able to deliver what you’re working on. Ending up on version 37 after amends is not conducive to work delivered on time and on budget, leaving nobody happy with the result. To keep projects grounded by bringing attention to tangible consequences and making stakeholders aware of the implications. 

Try asking:

• What is the impact of a delayed delivery?
• How would multiple revisions affect the budget?
• What knock-on effects are there on the timescale?

Speak the language of your stakeholders

Marketing can often seem like a dialect all of its own in some fields, especially those that are highly corporate or technical. Both qualitative and quantitative information have their merits, and will be useful depending on who you’re talking to. Whether it's a spreadsheet full of performance data, or a buzzing comment section on social media - be intentional about which people you choose to share which information with.

Try asking:

• What does success look like to you?
• What value do you think this activity will add?
• Does this activity require precise measurement?

Leave space for evolution

When looking to cultivate creativity with your marketing, allow yourself 10% of wild, unbridled craziness. Push your ideas further, and be happy taking that extra gamble - it’ll likely be worth the risk. Colouring in the lines only goes so far, and sometimes you need something that doesn’t fit neatly into a box.

Try asking:

• Can this be pushed outside of the comfort zone?
• What is the worst thing that could happen?
• How can thinking be changed around this project?

Embrace being small

Being a team of one or just a few people can be daunting with so much to do. Even so, a smaller team allows you to be more agile, giving you more freedom to do what you want (hypothetically at least). With fewer cooks in the proverbial kitchen, you might have less pushback against ideas, and face fewer barriers to delivery.

Try asking:

• Could some team members be informed rather than involved?
• How much input do you need?
• How can you sell your idea to senior team members?

Not everything is worth doing

Given how deeply invested everyone is in the final product, it’s difficult to shut down any ideas. However, constraints are necessary to funnel ideas into a realistic plan of action. Think confidently presenting managers with what you’re doing and why, rather than asking for permission and input. Bring stakeholders on the journey that you know the route to.

Try telling:

• The rationale behind a decision
• Why this decision is the most suitable one
• The hard deadlines in place

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time out to come along, and share their thoughts:

Temple, Joseph Homes, Talking Tables, Active Digital, The Executive Coaching Consultancy, Oxwash, I Love My Job, Sensat, Cripps, First Wealth.

What’s next?

We have lots more events coming up, and even more in the pipeline for the year. If you’re interested in joining our mailing list, you can register your interest here, so we can keep you in the loop. If there’s a particular topic that you’d love to table a discussion on, we’re all ears - get in touch here.