If you’ve not spent a lot of time around your creative services team members, you may have never heard the term swipe file before. A swipe file is a collection, a scrapbook of materials that have worked, arranged in such a way to inspire you and give you future ideas. Done properly, it can be…
Brain writing has come to the forefront again as a creative assistance tool. Companies are realizing brainstorming, as its currently handled, is deeply flawed, as I documented in Marketing Red Belt years ago. Why? Brainstorming suffers from group dynamics, most notably what I call the HIPPO problem: the Highest Individually Paid Person’s Opinion tends to…
I was asked recently about my books and what order you should read them in. That’s an interesting question. The order they came out in is not necessarily the order you should read them in. What order you should read my books in depends on what problems you’re facing. Are you struggling with creativity? Start…
Got writer’s block around a particular topic or blog post? There are dozens of different ways you can break writer’s block (some of which are unsurprisingly outlined in Marketing Red Belt), but one of the most reliable by far is to grab your digital camera (or smartphone with camera) and go on a photowalk. If…
Making mountains out of molehills is an old idiom that refers specifically to someone blowing an issue far out of proportion. In cognitive psychology, this is known as magnification. It’s such a common psychological phenomenon that we’ve had cultural idioms for centuries describing it, such as Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing. Magnification works based…
