By Dr Marie Taillard, CMC Director

Three years ago, ESCP Business School launched an innovative postgraduate programme, our Master in Marketing and Creativity. This bold move was based on the strong belief amongst several of us that marketing requires a fresh approach to address head-on the opportunities and challenges that come with technology and engaged customers. We developed a new curriculum and new content for each of the modules in the course. Three years later, 112 marketers have been or are going through the programme, representing upwards of 40 nationalities. Our graduates have joined the marketing staff of large multi-nationals and small start-ups across sectors and around the world. Our initial belief is confirmed every day and we now refer to our brand of marketing as Creativity Marketing.

Creativity Marketing is not about throwing away the know-how and theory that make up marketing as a practice or an academic discipline. It is about questioning and challenging, exploiting paradoxes, injecting audacity, turning ideas on their heads and connecting divergent dots. It embraces a different way of thinking about the relationships between customers, producers and other participants in the value chain. It redefines value and value creation. It places creativity in a head-on collision with rigour and analysis to spawn greater relevance and focus in “market making”.

In the spirit of Creativity Marketing, this blog is to be co-created by researchers in different fields around creativity, marketers, marketing students, consultants, strategy experts, journalists and whoever wants to contribute to our collective thinking. We’ll look to share our research, our teaching, our findings, our activities and our events. We’ll try to ask questions, provoke reflection and encourage discussions. In other words, we will put Creativity Marketing at work and continue to build it.

To kick us off, I want to introduce our upcoming event, our inaugural event on 28 June on Big Data, Marketing and Creativity. In reading about Big Data over the past year or so, I have been struck by two facts. First, there’s so much of it that no human can possibly get their heads around what is actually available. Second, there appears to be a disconnect between the people who actually know what to do with the data and the people who need it. Even with the growing availability of smart interface programmes that allow marketers to access the data directly, many marketers still seem limited in their queries and ability to see beyond the sheer volume of numbers. This is where we believe that creativity can make a huge difference. So, we are bringing together experts in analytics and marketing to talk about how creativity can add value to Big Data, how marketers need to look away from the headlights in order to regain a creative perspective on what the data might uncover, how to put teams together that will have this creative approach to Big Data, how to use Big Data creatively, but ethically. Let’s be clear: we don’t have the answers! We’ll be asking them and discussing them.

Join us for this free event on 28 June.

Useful links:

MSc in Marketing & Creativity
Creative London Summer Course