Can You Teach Creative Thinking?

I have this conversation all the time.

Someone running marketing at an agency or a SaaS company tells me their campaigns feel stale. Their content looks like everyone else's. They want "more creative ideas." And then they do one of two things. They hire someone with "creative" in their job title (usually from a brand agency, usually wearing nicer trainers than everyone else) and hope the problem sorts itself out. Or they run a brainstorm. Which produces a whiteboard full of sticky notes, a vague sense of progress, and exactly zero usable ideas.

Neither works. And it's not because the people are thick. It's because "be more creative" isn't an instruction. It's like telling someone to "be taller." You've described what you want without giving anyone a clue how to get there.

So can you actually teach creative thinking? Yes. But it looks nothing like what most people expect.

Here's what normally happens. Someone decides a campaign is needed. A brief gets written. It's either so vague it could apply to any company on Earth, or so prescriptive that the "creative" bit amounts to choosing between a blue background and a green one. Then a group of people sit in a room and try to have ideas. But what they actually discuss is formats. Should we do a webinar? An ebook? A LinkedIn carousel? Maybe a podcast?

Nobody stops to ask: do we have anything interesting to say?

And that's the whole problem. The conversation jumps straight to packaging before anyone's worked out what's going in the box. You end up with a beautifully designed ebook that says nothing your competitor's beautifully designed ebook doesn't also say. A webinar with a title so generic it could be a lorem ipsum placeholder. A LinkedIn post that reads like it was assembled from a bag of B2B Scrabble tiles.

This isn't a creativity deficit. It's a thinking deficit.

There's this persistent myth that creative people just "have ideas." Like there's a special gland. Some people are wired for it and the rest of us should stick to spreadsheets.

It's bollocks, mostly.

The real difference between someone who consistently produces good marketing ideas and someone who doesn't isn't raw creativity. It's the ability to find interesting problems. And that bit is absolutely teachable.

Most marketing teams start from what they want to say. "We're brilliant at Shopify Plus migrations." Fine. But that's your story, not your buyer's. Your buyer's version is: "My CEO has decided we're replatforming and I've been handed the project and I have genuinely no idea how to evaluate whether this is the right call or how to not get fired if it goes wrong."

That second version is specific. It's emotional. It's full of internal politics and career anxiety. And it's where the interesting marketing ideas live. Not in your capabilities deck. In their mess.

The first framing gets you a case study. The second gets you something a buyer actually wants to read.

I'm suspicious of frameworks. Most of them exist so consultants can put something on a slide. But there is a repeatable way to get to better ideas, and it has three parts.

Start with the buyer's actual problem, not your product.

Sit down and write out the five to ten things your ideal buyer is genuinely worried about right now. Not the sanitised version. The real one. "Their CFO keeps asking why they're spending £40k a month on an agency and nobody can show what it's producing." Or: "They've been told to expand into Germany and they've never sold outside the UK and they're quietly bricking it."

Good ideas come from tensions. Places where your buyer is stuck between competing pressures. Boss wants growth, finance wants cuts, IT wants stability, the board wants innovation. Find where those forces collide and you've got something worth building a campaign around.

Find the gap between what everyone says and what's actually true.

Every market has a set of things that get repeated so often nobody questions them anymore. In eCommerce right now: AI Search is the future, personalisation drives conversion, you need to be omnichannel. These might be partially true in certain contexts. But they're stated so broadly and so frequently that they've become furniture. Nobody notices them. Nobody learns anything from hearing them again.

The creative gold is almost always in the space between the consensus and reality. Where is the received wisdom wrong? Or at least, wrong for a specific type of buyer? If you can say that clearly, you've got something. If your reader's reaction is "thank god someone finally said that," you've just done more for your credibility than a year's worth of ebooks.

Rory Sutherland has this great line about how the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. That's the energy you want. Not contrarian for the sake of it. But willing to look at the accepted wisdom and ask: is that actually right? Or do we all just keep saying it because everyone else does?

Constrain yourself before you start generating ideas.

People think constraints kill creativity. It's the opposite. "Come up with a campaign idea" is so open it's paralysing. You'll sit there for an hour and come up with "maybe a webinar?" But "come up with a way to reach CFOs at mid-market DTC brands who are about to replatform, using one piece of content and a three-email follow-up sequence" is a puzzle you can actually solve.

Tight briefs produce interesting work. Loose briefs produce generic work. Every time. I don't know why this surprises people, but it does.

Quick rant.

The standard brainstorm is one of the most popular and least effective tools in marketing. It survives because it feels productive. Everyone's in a room. There are Post-its. Someone's written on a whiteboard. It looks like work is happening.

But it fails for predictable reasons. The brief is too open ("let's come up with ideas for Q3" is not a brief, it's a cry for help). The loudest people talk the most. The best thinkers, who tend to need time to actually think, go quiet. And there's no quality filter. You end up with forty ideas on a wall and no way to tell which ones are good.

If you absolutely must do a group session, don't use it to generate ideas. Give people the problem and the constraints in advance. Have them come with three written ideas each. Then use the session to poke holes and combine the best bits. That's a useful meeting. What you don't want is six people staring at a blank whiteboard hoping lightning strikes.

Honestly, the better approach is to skip the brainstorm entirely. Get one or two people who really understand the buyer to go away and develop a few concepts. Then let the wider team rip those apart. This is how most actually good work gets made. Not through collective inspiration. Through someone thinking hard about a specific problem and then having that thinking stress-tested by people who'll be honest about it.

There is one part of this you can't really teach. Might as well be upfront about it.

Taste.

Taste is the ability to look at two ideas that both tick the same boxes on paper and know which one is actually good. Which angle will land. Which headline earns a click without being clickbait. Which framing will make a senior buyer think "right, these people get it."

You can develop taste over time. Read widely. Look at what works in other sectors (some of the best B2B marketing ideas are just B2C ideas in a suit). Pay attention to what makes you stop scrolling as a buyer yourself. But it's slow to build. And some people just have a better nose for it than others. That's life.

The practical solution is that you don't need a whole team with great taste. You need one or two people with it, and you need to give them the authority to kill mediocre work before it ships. Most marketing teams don't produce average work because nobody can spot the good stuff. They produce average work because there's no acceptable way to say "this isn't good enough" without someone taking it personally.

Build that mechanism. Protect it. It matters more than any framework.

If you're running marketing at an agency or SaaS company and everything feels a bit samey, the answer isn't "get inspired." Inspiration is what people talk about when they don't have a process.

Talk to your buyers. Properly. Not through a persona document that was written two years ago and reads like a horoscope. Actual conversations. Find out what's keeping them up at night in specific, uncomfortable detail.

Challenge the lazy consensus in your market. Find the things everyone keeps repeating and ask whether they're actually true. Say something more honest instead.

Write tighter briefs. Absurdly tight. The narrower the problem, the more interesting the solution.

Stop brainstorming. Let smart people think on their own and then subject their thinking to proper scrutiny.

And give someone permission to say "no, this isn't good enough." That person is more valuable than any number of brainstorms.

Creative thinking in marketing isn't some mystical gift. It's what happens when you understand a problem properly and give yourself (or your team) the conditions to think about it without drowning in vague briefs and committee dynamics. You can absolutely teach it. You just can't shortcut it.

Waye helps ecommerce agencies and SaaS companies build marketing that earns attention from the right buyers. If your campaigns feel generic and your pipeline depends on referrals, we should probably talk.