Recently, our team in London held the first ideation session with our HIPP programme participant Husmus, an app that makes renting easy and affordable in order to build a world where everyone can enjoy renting privately.
The session gave us an opportunity to work collaboratively to think about the audience insights that could underpin a successful communications campaign. After our creative brainteaser, we worked in pairs to discuss our personal experiences of renting. We all expressed how emotionally charged and stressful the experience can be, from both sides – tenants and landlords.
We also discussed examples of what other brands have done from many different spheres of life, which have had a powerful impact, and looking at what methods we could use to have a similar effect for Husmus.
Sarah Wernér, founder of Husmus, who joined the session said, “It was great to meet more members of the Hotwire team and spend a few hours thinking creatively about our marketing and communications strategy. I was so happy to hear how Hotwire really understood the problem our company is trying to solve and I look forward to developing these creative ideas further in the New Year!”
Are you thinking of leading an ideation or creative thinking session with your team soon? Here are our key takeaways that made this session work well which you might like to try:
- Encourage as many different people as possible to attend. Make it cross-functional, cross ages, genders etc. to be as diverse as you can. In our session, we had Hotwire members from marketing, PR, finance, and digital, from junior to board level, who all have different, valuable, experience to bring to the table.
- Set a clear timeframe for the session and stick to it. Our activities were clearly timed, so we could get through as much as possible. Any ideas that were taking us off on a tangent were noted for further discussion at another time.
- Don’t be afraid to do these sessions virtually. Using software like Zoom has many benefits; for instance, we used breakout rooms to have discussions in pairs and small groups, to allow everyone to speak up. You can also record the call and use the transcript as a way of ensuring all the ideas are captured.
- Google some question starters and techniques that might be new to you and help people think outside the box. For example, for one task, we had 10 minutes individually to think about what would be the fun thing to do to solve this problem, the brave thing, the fastest thing, the easiest thing, or the provocative thing. The questions really got us thinking more broadly, rather than just picking tactics/ideas you have done before.
Thanks to Anastasia Pavlova, Rebecca Rhodes, and Natasha Gay for leading this session and to all of our team members who participated. Stay tuned for more updates as we get to work on the creative activation!