How to hold a successful brand creative meeting

Brainstorming has become a common problem-solving method in enterprises. It is the most commonly used method to stimulate group creativity. This method is fast, simple and effective. However, many organizations say that brainstorming is outdated and no longer effective. The author of the following article introduces the value of brainstorming. Let's take a look.

When a brand faces an important communication node, the company will generally organize a creative meeting and adopt the "brainstorming" method to collectively solve the problem. The late famous brand planner Mr. Ye Maozhong was one of the professionals who particularly liked to hold brainstorming creative meetings. He also invented the "holding urine method", which means that if you can't think of a creative idea, you don't "pee". Of course, the "holding urine" method is not advisable, and this method does harm your health.

Brainstorming has become a common problem-solving method in enterprises. It is the most commonly used method to stimulate group creativity. This method is fast, simple and effective. However, many organizations have been frustrated with brainstorming and finally gave up using it. So they said that brainstorming is outdated and no longer effective. But in fact, the real reason why people are frustrated is that they do not use brainstorming methods properly. A successful brainstorming is interesting and dynamic. It can generate many good ideas. But a poor brainstorming is frustrating and demotivating.

Since “brainstorming” is so valuable, let’s talk today about how to hold a good brand brainstorming creative meeting.

1. Set clear goals for the meeting

If the intention of a brand creative brainstorming is vague, it will easily turn into a "bullshit meeting" where everyone gossips and talks nonsense. Therefore, if you want to hold a brainstorming meeting, you must set a clear goal. The purpose of a brainstorming meeting is to generate many creative ideas in order to achieve a specific goal. The best way is to set this goal as a question. Vague goals are useless. "How can we do better in the integrated communication of our brand in 2023?" is not as specific and clear as "How do we formulate the integrated marketing calendar of the brand in 2023?"

However, it cannot be too specific, otherwise the meaning of brainstorming will be lost. If it is too specific, the work will be directly assigned to specific people to complete. Being too specific will limit brainstorming and reduce more possibilities. For example, a question like "How can we double sales by utilizing existing channels and current product settings?" may be too restrictive. Before each brainstorming meeting, a creative brief is prepared, and those who need to attend the meeting should write down the background information of the meeting, some existing situations, and the preparations that participants need to make before the meeting. This is to avoid the situation where participants are still in a "confused circle" when entering the meeting room.

2. Choose more people with relevant but different knowledge backgrounds to participate

If the participants in the creative meeting have too much knowledge, they will easily fall into a kind of "group thinking", which can easily restrict the creativity of the group. Therefore, participants should be carefully selected. At the same time, the number of participants should be controlled. If there are too many participants, the speeches will not be sufficient, and if there are too few participants, the necessary atmosphere of the creative meeting will be lacking. The number of participants should be controlled between 5 and 8 people. In the entire brainstorming group, some bystanders from other fields or even unrelated to the topic of discussion should be introduced. These people often put forward different perspectives and unique ideas. Discussions composed of participants from different backgrounds are the most effective. These people can cover different age groups, men and women, experienced veterans or newcomers.

3. Don’t let people judge your creativity too early, but guide your creativity

The most important principle of brainstorming is to postpone judgment. In order to encourage a large number of excellent and extraordinary ideas to emerge, it is very important to ensure that no one criticizes, negatively evaluates or judges any idea. Any idea that participants say, no matter how stupid it may seem, should be recorded. The principle of not judging during the idea generation stage is extremely important and needs to be strictly enforced. A good way to punish people who make judgments is to use a water gun.

4. Pursue quantity first, then quality

Creative meetings should not start analyzing ideas as soon as they get a few. Organizers should pursue "quantity" before quality. The more ideas, the better. Of all activities, brainstorming is one of the few where quantity improves quality. Think of it as a Darwinian process. The more different ideas are generated, the more likely some of them will eventually be selected. You need a lot of energy and a variety of voices to get a lot of unique ideas. Crazy ideas that are completely unusable often serve as springboards to new and brilliant solutions that can be adopted.

5. Keep the “good ideas” in the creative meeting

Don’t end a brainstorming session without reaching a clear action plan, even if a bunch of ideas have been generated. Without seeing a real result, people will feel that the process was meaningless and get discouraged. The ideas should be analyzed quickly during the meeting. A good way to do this is to divide the summary into three parts: insightful ideas, interesting ideas, or objections.

If there are particularly outstanding ideas among the insightful ideas that are worth implementing immediately, they should be immediately handed over to the relevant implementers as a practical project. If time is tight, you can use the expert scoring method to evaluate good ideas and use the five-point scoring method to select the best ideas at the meeting. Participants score each idea. They can freely allocate five points to their favorite ideas. For example, five points can be divided equally among five ideas, each idea gets one point, or all five points can be given to a certain idea. Then, add up the scores of each idea, select the idea with the highest score, and leave it for later discussion.

VI. Final

The convener can express gratitude to all those who participated and, if time permits, invite everyone to a relaxing afternoon tea or evening dinner.

Author: Liu Yichun

Source: WeChat public account "Liu Yichun's Brand Business Innovation (ID: shangyeyiguohui)"