The art of marketing is dependant on the creator.

Marketing is a creative work par excellence. Creative does not necessarily mean artistic or graphics. Artistry is another concept that is often confused with creativity.

Creative work is any work that creates new value where there was none and at the same time has an impact on the emotions, thinking and mainly on the behavior of those exposed to it. Accordingly, a creative person is someone who creates something new, something of her own, her own solution, her own answer, which has value for herself and, importantly, for others.

Creative is the work done by such a creative person and is unique, because he is unique and has put into it a part of himself, his talent, his knowledge and mainly his mental and spiritual world. He has also put in personal effort, has made an investment of personal energy. Of course, there is also the concept of co-creation, where there are more creators and they work collectively or complementarily on the creation.

The characteristics of creative work

Creation needs soul and spirit. Otherwise it is not creation, but a construction, a result, a sum, a derivative.

What a machine produces is not creation, the calculations a computer makes are not creation, the result of a programmed process is not creation.

But it is creation to imagine a machine, to build it and to program it so that it makes what you imagined, as you imagined it. It is creation to use the result of a complex calculation to devise a solution to an unsolved problem. It is creation to envision the ideal outcome of a process and then to build a process that gives that outcome.

Creativity requires knowledge, experience and skill. The creative person evolves, and so does his creativity. Innate gifts and inclinations are a leaven for creativity, but it becomes more mature and more productive when it is tempered with knowledge, with research, with experiences, with failures, with tools, with technology, with technique, with practice, with questioning.

At the same time, the creator also “works” on his character, his principles, his values. Every creative work is filtered and passes through the character of the creator, and this process ultimately accounts for the uniqueness of the work and its special value, that is, the characterization "creative" is due to this filtering.

The art of marketing. Marketing is a human and creative task, and therefore unpredictable.

Marketing is a creative work. It is a combination of science, art and know-how. It is a human work. It is done by people for people. That is, by the unpredictable for the unpredictable. And no matter how much we have developed Science and the techniques and methods of predicting human behavior, even manipulating it, what is truly new and improves people's lives is usually the result of unpredictable human imagination, which was implemented in an unpredictable way and had unpredictable positive results. In other words, it is the result of unpredictable human creativity.

"You can only connect the dots backwards" -Steve Jobs

Huge brands of yesterday and today were just that before they became famous and huge - they were unexpected! Neither the founders, nor the competitors, nor the consumers could ever have predicted the evolution, the appeal, the size and the impact of brands like Apple, Amazon, Coca-Cola, KFC, NIKE to name a few world-famous ones that not only dominated, but significantly changed everyone's lives.

Their success was not predetermined,nor were they the result of a recipe. Their evolution was not foreseen even by their founders themselves. As Steve Jobs himself said in one of his famous speeches “you can only connect the dots backwards”, that is, great things were not planned exactly as they eventually happened, but only by looking back in time can one see the full picture of all the events that led to them.

Those who work in business know very well that no business plan or marketing plan ever goes as planned. This has not stopped some projects from becoming huge successes, while others have failed miserably. But in everyone's personal life, nothing ever goes exactly as planned. Even if the end result is roughly what we were aiming for, it rarely comes out as planned.

The difference between a "recipe" and a "strategic plan".

This does not mean that great achievements come by chance or that they come by themselves in an automatic way. On the contrary. Great achievements are the result of the persistent and patient work of the people who envisioned them, believed in them and pursued them.

Every great human achievement, that is, every thing that nature did not make, began as an idea, as a thought, as a vision, in the mind of a single person. What is it, really, that turns into reality, something that exists only as an idea, as a thought, as a mental conception? It is certainly not a tested “recipe”. With a recipe, nothing new is ever made, only something known and tested. With a recipe, a machine can produce identical products, but the same recipe never gives something new. What is needed is a strategic plan, a plan of action, and of course, action!

The difference between a recipe and a strategic action plan is that the plan contains dynamic, personal and unique elements of the person or people who made it. In addition to knowledge, science and know-how, it contains experience, imagination, ingenuity, perception, emotions, hopes, fears and faith. In addition to logical combinations, it also contains things that are not logical, but intuition.

A strategic action plan, unlike a recipe, must be flexible, dynamic, capable of corrections, changes, additions. The recipe determines the result. Same recipe, same result. On the contrary, the plan is what is determined by the result we seek. The intended result remains constant, but the plan is adapted, enriched or even replaced by a better one if necessary.

Many people with the same recipe, as long as they can execute it to the letter, will successfully produce exactly the same result. On the contrary, for the same intended result, ten different people, or groups of people, will make ten different plans, which will adapt along the way in unpredictable ways and in the end will yield ten different implementations at different times and with different degrees of quality or success.

Marketing is an art. It is dependant upon the creator.

Marketing is not a recipe. It is not a formula. It is not just knowledge, science and application. It is not just technology. It is not just available resources. It is not just calculation.

Marketing is creative work, it is art. And what it creates is value, that is, utility, improvement, satisfaction, enjoyment, inspiration, security, performance. This value leads to recognition, distinction, preference, culture change, behavior change. This value is embodied in products, services, ideas, artworks and behavior change manifests itself as adoption by consumers, customers, “followers”.

The 4 ways technology has changed the marketing ecosystem.

There is a fortified illusion that marketing has already been largely automated and that a keyboard and sufficient technology skills are enough to do effective marketing.

The available technology, the internet, social media platforms, powerful computers and “smart” mobile devices with equally powerful applications, the automation that makes highly efficient workflows available and accessible, reinforce this illusion. AI and AI agents are making this illusion look very much like reality.

The illusion is very strong because technology and its applications have indeed dramatically changed four basic things and a whole bunch of others that come from them.

1. The first is the way people communicate and connect on the planet, regardless of distance, geographical and socio-cultural parameters.

2. The second is the easy, fast and unlimited access of people to all kinds of information.

3. The third is the equally easy, fast and unlimited access of information to people.

4. The fourth, most recent and “cosmogenic”, is the introduction of AI (Artificial Intelligence) into the everyday lives of businesses, professionals and consumers. That is, the ability to interact in human terms with an (artificial) intelligence that has tremendous stores of accumulated knowledge, unimaginable speed of immediate access to it, the ability to mix and combine information and present it in a natural human way and inconceivable “learning” abilities.

Today, everyone can connect and communicate with everyone, having access to unlimited information, but also granting almost unlimited access to their personal data, which automatically becomes information for anyone who wants to use it.

This substantially different landscape of “sociability” and “creativity” (let’s call it that for now) provides tremendous tools at the disposal of marketing, which mainly translate into an unimaginable, just a few years ago, ability to access, communicate, interact and transact with any person who has access to the internet, and in an extremely detailed way of targeting.

This is a spectacular development in itself. But it is so spectacular that it can blind businesses, brands and professionals to the cynical reality. That is to say, that this is a development that certainly changes the field of action and puts new impressive tools in their hands, but at the same time, these tools are nothing more than tools, and available to everyone, while the goal remains the same, namely the creation of value, change for the better.

The most interesting questions about marketing are still seeking creative answers.

While there are incredibly effective ready-made solutions for how to discover the audience we are interested in, where to find them and how to develop communication and interaction with them, the basic questions of marketing remain unanswered and the basic problems remain unsolved, until they are answered by people-creators and take shape through brands that incorporate these solutions-proposals.

Such questions-problems are, for example:

• Which audience exactly do I serve and what are the problems, needs, desires, fears, hopes that I want to cover with my product or service?

• How does my product or service create value for this audience, that is, which of the above issues does it answer and how does it provide new and better solutions and answers?

• How do I “dress” my product or service so that everything about it, every touchpoint, sends the same basic message and at the same time serves to create value for my customer/consumer? That is, how do I build my brand (branding)?

• How do I put all this value I offer into words, images, sensations and emotions, that is, how do I communicate with clarity so that I am understood, with a special tone so that I stand out from the noise, with empathy so that I gain interest, with emotion so that I motivate change?

The answers to these questions/problems are given by creators who do their job well. It is an art form. It is the art of marketing. It is creation. The creation is not prefabricated, it depends on its creator(s), there is no ready-made recipe for it, no two are the same, its appeal is not assured from the beginning, its timing is not guaranteed, its implementation is subject to immeasurable factors, its “audience” is not assured.

Talent plays a role, intuition plays a role and timing also plays a role. Just as important are the accumulated knowledge, experience, maturity, knowledge of tools and technology, the continuous and long-term practice of the art by the creator (in this case marketing by the marketer), which are all factors that highlight the importance of the creator’s work, for new solutions to old and new problems.