Rassak’s Law: Creativity and Competition

Over the years Rassak has helped a bunch of companies solve sticky problems through creative communications. So when I was invited to present to a group of business execs and investors at Gild International in Barcelona last week, I thought Creativity itself would an interesting topic. Big thanks to Saar Gur,  David Hornik, and Steve Reale for the great ideas to prep for this talk. I wish I could’ve used all your examples.

BTW, if the bit in the video about “brutal editing” in the creative process speaks to you… it’s a theme I have spent some time on in this blog. See Editing Engineers, What’s In a Word?, Less is More, and Where Blood Tasted of Blood and Honey of Honey.

“Creative Risk” … Seeking Ideas and Data

I’m slated to give a talk at Gild International in Barcelona in December on the topic of Creative Risk. My thesis is pretty straightforward: the more competition you have, the more creative you have to be to get noticed and win.

Playing with the theme of risk, I’m planning to take a quick look at the types of risk investors (especially VC investors) think about when looking at companies to back (or not). I’ll then introduce a less-talked about type of risk: creative risk—basically how adept a management team is at leveraging creativity to win. I created the little graphic above for the talk. I might adjust as I get feedback and refine my thinking.

Any thoughts are much appreciated. I’m looking in particular for cases with data… examples of companies that have taken creative risks to stand out. Examples I’m playing with right now are:

• DoubleTwist’s placing of a highly competitive ad ON an Apple store — and their handling of the fallout.
• Mixx using creatiivty in their user interface to fight against competitors — and what appears to be some success in their usage numbers.
• I’ll look at how Microsoft has chosen to deploy creativity more now that they are seeing real competition from Apple — and how some think this is bad idea.

Either leave comments or mail me at barak@rassak.com

Thanks so much

Creating Culture…

I have been thinking a lot lately about creating culture… and what forms of communication are required or desirable to aid in this task. I’m thinking about this for Rassak as I look at ways to scale the business (cultural development is vital to growing a people-centric, professional service business).

Billboard for free Catalan courses

Interestingly… right now I’m surrounded by attempts at creating/transmitting culture. Barcelona is in Catalonia, a semi-autonomous region of Spain with a distinct (and very proud) culture.  And the government invests in cultural development on many levels.

Language is one key driver of culture. It’s one of the tools we are using to shape culture at rassak. We’re not pushing a different language entirely (some companies do… would you like a VENTE Latte?) but we are beginning to choose words carefully and create templates for documents filled with language that we believe represents our culture. Since these are templates they not only represent the culture, they help propagate it each time the template serves as the basis for a new document.

Language is a key tool used by the Catalan government too. Check this billboard in the metro for free courses in the language of Catalonia — Catalan. . The government here believes in the power of language to transmit/maintain/develop/share culture.

More of the billboard

BTW, this newspaper, el Periodico, began publishing in Spanish here in the 70s.

In the mid-90s it added a second edition in Catalan, giving the paper access to substantial regional government subsidies (per wikipedia).