Creative Team’s Letter to the CEO

Dear Mr. CEO,

I know it’s not easy being a CEO. From new product development and ambitious revenue goals to competitive market forces and pricing pressure, there are so many challenges. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught in the day-to-day and near-term of managing quarter to quarter. Ultimately, you need to balance near-term performance with long-term strategy.

Lately, many CEOs are downsizing to right-size their expenses. While I understand the urgency of getting to profitability, I have seen too many examples of straight cuts of 20% across the board. I urge you to push your thinking to realign your team to win in a new competitive landscape.

I am Creo the Creative, and I am here to help you innovate with new breakthroughs. When I think about creative, it’s about more than designing a new logo or advertisement, it’s about designing a whole new way of doing business. Yes, us creatives do have the capacity to stretch thinking beyond the ordinary. We also tend to have immense passion for all things digital. There are growing trends towards mashups (insert examples) and the multi-experiential (insert examples). I can help you experiment and pursue new opportunities.

Wait, you say that there is no money for experimentation and innovation? I know money is tight, but if you don’t invest in tomorrow, then how are you going to attain a leadership position? Let me give you a few suggestions of what we can do to get the ideas flowing.

1. Customer Insight. We should be talking to customers, even shopping along with customers of our competitors, to gain new insights.
2. Collaboration. We should have a collaborative approach that includes a range of team members to help generate new ideas.
3. Prioritization. We can’t do everything, so we should prioritize the opportunities that make the biggest impact…and let’s do them well.
4. Creative Design. Our product and creative teams can provide leadership in translating the best ideas into innovative product design that is optimal for the customer. We might even want to include our customers in beta testing.
5. New Communications. Can we please stop doing the same 30-second tv spots? Let’s do some fresh, groundbreaking marketing that really gets noticed.

In these times of change, we can’t do business as usual. We must be inspired to breakthrough by harnessing the creativity and innovation of our team to deliver something truly special to our customers.

Yours Truly,

Creo the Creative

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