What is Creative Management?

Introduction

Organizational management is complex and multi-dimensional in nature. It integrates several elements, activities and processes oriented towards achieving organizational goals. Amidst the fast-changing business landscape, organizations are moving ahead from classical criteria of cost and performance to integrating creativity and innovation for overall efficiency. Such integration involves exploring and implementing the concepts at various functional levels of management to evolve a creative perspective.

Creativity as a skill involves bringing something new into being and as a process involves management. It encompasses all the processes oriented towards value addition such as motivating the workforce to explore their creative energy and providing a platform to nurture innovation while embracing change. In this conceptual age, where businesses continue to implement creativity-intense activities, it becomes an inevitable component for continued success.

Creative Management

Creativity is regarded as the key attribute for organizations to proactively respond to the next-generation business challenges. It is the synthesis of the principles, concepts and approaches of creativity and management. In simpler terms, creativity allows venturing into newer grounds as well as exploring possibilities.

According to Peter Drucker, the renowned management consultant, two primary functions of management are marketing and innovation. Creativity forms the core of innovation and a typical management theory relates creativity solely to the conceptualization of novel ideas. In a broader sense, creativity also involves innovation and implementation of ideas, frameworks and processes, which together form the essence of it.

Within organizations, the scope of creative management extends to include specializations in marketing such as advertising, brand management, media management and marketing communication. Product design and marketing programs are two prime areas that offer vast scope for creativity in organizations.

Creativity Management – Marketing

Marketing is one of the complicated tasks of management. Marketing strategies include creativity-intensive activities to enhance brand recognition, improve advertising campaigns, liaison with media as well as to better communicate the marketing goals. Additional marketing tasks include ensuring continued customer satisfaction, real-time engagement and sustaining loyalty. To achieve these tasks marketing strategists produce creative concepts individually or in small collaborative groups. Implementation of such concepts involves making forecasts, adopting new marketing techniques, which inherently carry a certain level of risk. It attempts to address such risks through stimulating creative process and invoking techniques to manage uncertainty.

Advertising

As a key function of marketing, advertising also comes under the creative management wing owing to its core tasks of communicating product information to customers. Further, advertisers are also concerned with designing strategies for product/service launch or trial, using persuasion for optimizing sales, monitoring demand-supply levels, attracting and retaining customers among others. Advertising strategies targeted at customers demand creativity and consequently provide scope for this techniques and processes.

Brand Management

A brand represents the unique identity of a company and can be anything from a logo, design or any unique attribute that distinguishes the product from others. Brand management strategies could be complex involving extensive market research, product differentiation, maintaining brand reputation, creative communication and constant evaluation. Creative management enables brand managers to effectively communicate about their brand, liaison smoothly with various teams such as product developers, researchers, creative heads as well as customers.

Media Management

The digital revolution has the greatest impact on marketing, making media management a core component of marketing strategies. As a distinctive division of marketing, media management team is constantly focused on creative avenues to use the technology. Popular choices as marketing tools are messaging apps, virtual reality, social media as well as innovative videos. The tools allow media managers to seek diversity in their approaches, have an open mind to new ideas, permit failures, reward risk takers as well as manage and control creative activities.

Conclusion

The vast scope of creative management, especially within marketing offers a great career opportunity. The industry needs creatively passionate business managers with the ability to grasp technology-related strategies. Anyone seeking to pursue a career in this field should develop certain essential attributes such as creative thinking, strong observatory instincts, effective communication, patient listening and an eye for detail.