It may sound like a recruiter’s job only, but the matter of fact is, your marketing success will be determined by the skill set and experience of the person in charge of your marketing. As such, you should take a keen interested in finding the person with the right profile for your SME. As discussed earlier, in SMEs marketers have a generalist profile, but even the most broad knowledge does not cover all aspects that are necessary to connect to the target audience on an initial shoestring budget.

Hiring for the start-up phase

You want a person who can market plan and understands the value of organising not only your planning, but comes well connected to local vendors when it is time to implement activities. It is important to start off with a strong brand development. The marketer in the start-up phase can either develop brands (has a creative background, e.g., comes with a job title like ‘art director’) or is a marketing manager who can direct an outsourced team to develop the brand in accordance with your market strategy. This includes knowledge or access to market research so that the brand development is grounded in real world needs and wants of your customers. Don’t fall in the trap of thinking that all you need is a logo for your business cards, unless you are not serious of building a company brand that gives you return on investment.

A person with strong creative background may give your visual market presence the edge if you are in life style industries, however, if you are manufacturing widgets or other commodity products, you may want to consider a B2B (business-to-business) marketer with a commerce degree who understands the ins and outs of B2B marketing and out sources the creative parts on your behalf.

SME brands are now in a fortunate position to have low-cost, far-reach digital tools at their communication disposal but it requires some dedication and expertise to leverage them. Most of all, after the start-up phase, marketing is about widening the appeal and building on existing equity internally and externally of your business. You might find, that your start-up brand builder or manager does not want to continue in a monitoring role, or that stewardship and control is not their cup of tea. Find a supplement or replacement for the next phase in your company life cycle.

Hiring For Growth

This is the phase when initial ground work has been done, the company should have a brand identity and marketing direction. And a pretty good understanding who their customers and competitors are and will be. The creative part now involves planning and steering the brand. Stewardship is replacing development for the most part of the marketer’s SME role. Budget presentation, market research and campaign planning are the forte of SME marketers in a business growth phase.

The role is working closely with your sales department (where applicable) and influences service delivery and internal brand building (internal brand building: connecting your brand with your employees). How much of the stewardship can and should reside in one person depends on your growth plans and business strategy. As mentioned in part 1 of this post, its about skill distribution and industry fit.

Picasso (1907) Source: Wikipedia

Richard Ogle described how Picasso came to paint ‘the first real masterpiece of the 20th Centrury’, the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In his book ‘Smart World‘ Ogle argues that there is no such thing than the lonesome Genius who came up with the idea overnight.

Regardless of profession or calling, Ogle argues, that humankind has a collective consciousness in which trailblazers like Picasso delve to retrieve their ground breaking ideas. Picasso is quoted in referring to African art for the inspiration of this painting.

By thinking outside the brain and tapping into the extended History and wealth of experience of the extended Mind (Ogle 2007, 10) we see how all great inventions actually came to be. Think of the internet itself- Wikipedia is just one example of such an extended external brain in action.

It is interesting to look at intangible assets in firms that way. Perhaps intangible assets (Intellectual Property, Trademarks and Patents) and their nature of ’suddenly leaping onto stage’, thus ‘disrupting the status quo’ are just an expression of where we are going as a human society. Look closely and we can see how the collective conscious is opening up individual creativity, for example with the ‘Open Source’ concept.

Not one company can claim to ‘own the ideas’ since everything is connected through history, material, memory. This is a scary thought for economists and accountants alike. Yet, this disruptive idea space (Ogle) was first named by Schumpeter as prerequisite to entrepreneurship.

The intangible is quickly becoming a new stage of consciousness, a way forward to the next new thing. It is true that our current Western business models  can’t put a price tag on it- which I assume means ‘making the intangible tangible’ in current economic thinking. If the summary of collective social networks are actually creating the new value in our economies than it is time to investigate the consistency of this mix instead of denying its contribution to firm assets as not quantifiable.

Consensio: We both agree that creativity does not need innovation but innovation does not happen without creativity. You are challenging people in organisations to think outside the box, (thus to become more creative). How do you teach them to go beyond creativity?

Kevin Carroll: I define innovation as something that is new and different AND THAT ADDS VALUE. If it doesn’t add value, then I classify it as simply creativity. If the idea can increase someone’s pleasure (make you more productive, gain you more respect, create more revenue, build your awareness in the marketplace) or decrease their pain (lower your stress, help you lose weight, save you time) then it’s adding value which means it’s innovation.

Consensio: What made you realise this is an organisation issue and what are you doing as a consultant to address that?

Kevin Carroll: Everybody is constantly talking innovation, innovation, innovation..or they use the cliché: “Think Outside the Box.” But I realized that no one teaches people how to do it. It’s nice talking about it, but you have to know how to execute the process.  Also, Breakthrough Thinking needs to be fostered throughout the organization and rewarded…I show them how to do that, too.

Consensio: Are you confronted by some organisational members (eg accountants and CFO’s) who don’t think workshops and courses are money effectively spent? How do you counterbalance these barriers?

Kevin Carroll: I show them my case studies to prove the ROI.

Consensio: Do you use your own problem solving techniques? when do you catch yourself not using them effectively?

Kevin Carroll: Yes, I use my own problem solving techniques and I use some that have been around for centuries. The key is that we all need to build the habit so that we use them automatically. I catch myself getting stuck frequently and I have to consciously apply the techniques.

Consensio: If you could wave a wand and creativity would become the natural tool for organisational problem solving, would we automatically build better products and services?

Kevin Carroll: Yes we would, because we would have a clearer understanding of what the underlying problem really is and we’d be able to fix it. The biggest challenge with being more innovative is that people do not define the problem clearly!!! They state it in vague terms and they then they go about trying to solve it. You’ll get nowhere doing it this way.

Consensio: Would more or just different types of consumers and clients buy them?

Kevin Carroll: Both.

At its heart, creativity is simply the production of novel, appropriate ideas in any realm of human activity, from science, to the arts, to education, to business, to everyday life. The ideas must be novel–different from what’s been done before-but they can’t be simply bizarre; they must be appropriate to the problem or opportunity presented. Creativity is the first step in innovation, which is the successful implementation of those novel, appropriate ideas.

In this paradigm that means, that one can be creative and leave it at that- creativity is only the beginning of what is maybe an implementation of a new idea.  Therefore the often unspoken expectation in organisations to introduce more ‘freedom and courses to express creativity’ may lead to disenchantment down the track when the playful creativity has not lead automatically to ground breaking new processes and practices. Perhaps we have to acknowledge that innovation needs creativity, but that in return creativity does not need innovation.

He observed, that firms were not static output-restrained entities, but that their interactions with the market were of interest and impact to the whole economic system. He noted the cost of resource investment as barrier to firm imitators.
Yet he also reflected, that copycats would always exist in markets. New ways of doing business could produce above normal returns on investments. And Schumpeter concluded that exogenous disruptions are vital to “creative destruction”. In his observation, at the core of the firm was the entrepreneurial vision. Creating or adopting innovations would give firms the necessary competitive advantage.

His work is giving intangible asset creation, firm theory and the processes necessary for creation new integrative meaning. To put it simple; questioning the status quo may give an advantage to innovation in firms, however healthy earnings could also result from less ‘disruptive’ innovations.

…In dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process… (1942).