Making Emotional Connections Through Creative Innovation

To me it’s interesting because we live in a technology filled world and I think a lot of the excitement and the hype is around data and social media and the science of marketing and I’m really excited to be thinking about The Art of Marketing (this is a fantastic conference by the way). The art of it is really appealing to people’s emotions, it’s the people side and you can’t underestimate how important that is. We learn about futures and functions of technologies and we try to market that to our customers, but we also need to understand how to connect with their hearts and that often is much harder.

In thinking about creating a place where innovation and creativity can really flourish, what I would really suggest and this is what I love about to do is look outside of the industry that we are in and look for great ideas, role models, practices over there that we would never think of. Honestly, that’s really why I wrote the Lady Gaga book because I saw a pop star of all things doing amazing work: creating loyalty, loyal customers and she was using strategies that we can apply and you don’t have to wear a meat dress. So I talk about those in the book and I think it’s exciting to look at completely different things in industries, even things that are so far away from what you’re doing and see what you can pull. That, to me is innovation.