Embrace Creativity and Its Potential and
You'll Harvest the Fruits of Your Labors

By Ronald de Vlam

After reining in their creative impulses to within reasonable limits, Webb Scarlett deVlam created a category-leading, functional, and ergonomic bottle for ExxonMobil. deVlam created a category-leading, functional, and ergonomic bottle for ExxonMobil.

Designers thrive on creativity. Like pigs in mud, we just love to indulge and waddle in sketches, magazine tear-outs, and collages. If we are not properly ring-fenced by a well-articulated design brief, we'll go off on tangents that are "neither use nor ornament" when it comes to a client's expectations. Here are my thoughts on creativity; how we should harness it, where it can best add value, and when creativity--for all its chaos and disruptiveness--should be embraced.

Back in September 2003, ExxonMobil approached us to work on the Mobil 1 brand, the crown jewel in their portfolio of their motor oil brands. Boy, were we fired up. For any designer (males especially and I suppose it helps if you're a car fanatic)--so I take that back--for some designers Mobil 1 is the Holy Grail. The design brief invited us to tackle all kinds of consumer oil changing needs with gadgets, tools, and accessories that could help make the Mobil 1 bottle look like the Starship Enterprise.

And off we went on our creative travels, exceeding consumer expectations with breakthrough solutions that not only helped reduce mess and stress during the oil change, but also supported Mobil 1's brand positioning as the technological performance leader in synthetic lubricants.

A dose of reality

Oh boy, did the engineers (procurement and operations included) have a field day with us. Within weeks, data obtained to evaluate the lead concepts (which were also consumer preferred) revealed that the cost of goods for packaging would almost double, distribution efficiencies would be 75% versus current, with the retailer taking a similar hit on shelf efficiencies--not to mention tooling costs, reduced cycle times, and reduced line efficiencies. I could go on.

Long-term relationships can foster great creativity because design ideas can spill over from one project to the next, like with these Tommee Tippee baby products.

I thought it was because I failed to wear a tie for one of our presentations, but I should have also seen it coming. Just because ExxonMobil is one of the world's largest (if not richest) companies, it doesn't mean that it has a bottomless well to market its brands. I guess we underestimated the capital and intellectual investment that these operations have invested in their factories.

After all, ExxonMobil makes most of its money business-to-business rather than business-to-consumer. In hindsight, our creativity should have been more focused on where and how we could obtain more operational flexibility, stretching beyond their comfort zones but still within economic realities.

Fast forward another year and fortunately our insights and creative efforts were rewarded with a very distinctive and dynamic one-liter bottle design. Designed to be almost identical (footprint, cap, neck finish, etc.) to other packages filled on their current filling line, the bottle successfully supports the brand's unique, premium attributes and helps Mobil 1 standout from its brethren of portfolio brands and its key competitors. We delivered on very strict and well-defined criteria, a challenge that actually required a lot of tempered and focused creativity.

Saving ideas and letting go

I always encourage designers to look beyond the fence that a design brief may have ringed around them. The key is to harness those ideas and ensure the client understands the value of those ideas--perhaps for a rainy day in the future. We have many other examples where the "not-selected" concepts for one project became the embryo for other upstream projects. You could call this strategic creativity, since it's the by-product of a long-term relationship with clients.

We have been lucky to grow with several clients; one of them is Jackel International with whom we have built a very credible portfolio of baby products. The spillover of ideas from one project lead to new ideas and innovations for another product. The intellectual properties created in each of these projects have helped this company grow six-fold in the five years that we have worked with them. The lesson for both client and consultant is to invest in a long-term relationship and know which ideas are useful now and which are useful later. Don't file away the rejects!

But the biggest kick I get out of being a designer is facilitating creativity. For instance, at the beginning of every project we encourage a summit of all the key stakeholders of the different factions impacted by the new to-be-proposed packaging, including procurement, operations, product supply, etc. We like to host these more "linear professions" in our creative lounge where we are surrounded by packaging samples, magazines, pin-up walls, markers, paper, and even the ability to make quick mock-ups or prototypes.

It's great to see engineers letting go of their data and attention to detail and to see their pride in being a co-architect of something quite radical, albeit not abstract. As these projects progress downstream, it is those very people you will need to help commercialize the concepts into the marketplace, something much less challenging once you get their cooperation with an innovation of which they are co-credited.

We are all human. We learn by mistakes. The creative process is often quite messy, with lots of mistakes providing a few moments of brilliance. Most importantly, for my practice, it is always a team effort, between my creative resources and those of the client--creative resources that are often untapped.

Ronald de Vlam is founding partner of Webb Scarlett deVlam's Chicago office. Ronald leads a multi-disciplinary creative design team of structural and graphic designers, and has delivered winning designs for Procter & Gamble's CoverGirl, Tide, and Olay brands as well as other high-profile clients such as Kimberly-Clark, Miller, and General Mills. Visit www.wsdv.com