Any and all marketing materials, from advertisements and brochures to Web sites and packages, benefit from the use of a creative brief, a document that lays out the basic purpose and focus of a specific marketing piece and provides some supporting information that gives you grist for your creative mill.

Okay, time to be creative. Ready, set, go. Come up with any good ideas yet? No? Okay, try again. Now do you have some good ideas? What? No? If you can’t be creative at will, don’t be alarmed. Most people face this problem, whether in or out of the marketing field.

Most groups of people when confined to a conference room for a morning do little more than argue about stale old ideas. Or even worse, somebody suggests an absolutely terrible new idea, and the rest of the group jumps on it and insists the suggestion is great . . . thus eliminating the need for them to think. If you hope to get a group to actually be creative, use structured group processes.

After you have your creative brief in hand (see the preceding section for help writing one), you’re ready to start brainstorming or using any other creativity tools you care to try (see the “Generating Rich Ideas” section later in this categories for some helpful tools). The creative brief gives you a clear focus and some good working materials as you apply your creativity to product development.

Question brainstorming involves generating novel questions that can provoke your group into thinking more creatively. This technique follows the same rules as brainstorming, but you instruct the group to think of questions rather than ideas.

Creativity isn’t a science; it’s a habit involving the use of a loose collection of flaky behaviors. Like soaking up information, questioning the problem, tossing ideas back and forth with an associate, and then setting the whole issue aside to incubate in the back of your mind while you do something else. So plan to work in different ways when exercising your creativity.

The goal of brainstorming is to generate a long list of crazy ideas, some of which may be surprisingly helpful. Brainstorming gets people to do out-ofthe-box thinking – in which they generate unusual ideas beyond their normal thought patterns. Don’t let your group just go through the motions of brainstorming.

The smartest move to make when you have a stunning, timeless, classic success in marketing is to leave it alone. But how many of those kinds of concepts can you think of? An orange paper box of Arm and Hammer baking soda. The IBM logo. A Porsche sports car. A Swiss Army Knife. The Energizer Bunny.