Riding on the coat-tails of other people’s ideas.

People without creativity have been taking other people’s ideas, probably since the beginning of time. While there is rarely an original idea, it is important to make sure you look to other people’s work for inspiration and not imitation. Whatever creative services you are offering, whether you are talking about graphic design companies, advertising firms or a branding agency, to have your own source of creative inspiration is imperative to success.

A prime example is the “got milk?” advertising campaign. This is creative advertising at its finest. Pure and simple. Two words that are grammatically incorrect, yet are so effective that they have been branded into the minds of almost every American. So good in fact, a lot of smaller graphic design companies thought it would be good for their clients marketing, and we started to see all kinds of variations on the phrase “got milk?”. So many, that people started to become immune to it and now we see advertisements like “got lawn?”

The point is, taking someone else’s idea or a variation on someone else’s idea and pretending its your own is lame. Unoriginal people do this not because they can’t think for themselves, but because they think it would be more beneficial to ride on the coat-tails of other people’s great ideas. The reality is if people put just a little effort into their brand strategy or brand positioning, they would find that they have what it takes to come up with branding that is original and exciting.

We don’t want this to be taken negatively. We think that everyone has the ability to be creative in their own way. Some people are good at creative advertising. Some people are good at graphic design. All people are inspired by the work of others, but we think it’s important to make sure that your final product could survive if the first product wasn’t so awesome.