The Creative Alliance, Strategic Marketing, Interactive, Public Relations

Creativity in Economic Hard Times

Tanzanian-born multimedia artist and composer Walter Kitundu, age 35, creates hybrid instruments out of turntables and strings. One of his inventive instruments is the Blue Steel String 1200 Phonoharp. It uses a phonograph turntable to pick up vibration.

“Many people for years have been trying to isolate the turntable from vibration, precisely because it’s so good at picking it up,” Kitundu said in a recent interview. “So I turned that on its head. When I pluck the strings of the phonoharp, the vibrations are actually varied into the body of the turntable, and they’re amplified by the cartridge.”

Thus, by amplifying—quite literally—what others perceived as a negative, Kitundu has invented an interesting array of never-before known musical instruments.

Finding inspiration in the Japanese koto and the West African cora, he says that some instruments just come out of his own imagination.

But it’s his process that is so remarkable.

“I build them, and I find out what they sound like after they’re built,” he says. “I’ve blown up a couple of turntables in the process of making new things, but those have always been great learning processes.”

He calls it “trial and terror.”

I think any business owner or CEO can relate to that. Inventing and reinventing a company on the fly. Turning negatives into positives.

But here’s the really cool part of Kitundu’s perspective:

He visits flea markets, finding ways to creatively reuse the pre-owned objects he discovers there.

“I find that if you limit your palette and you limit your tools, you have to think more creatively about how to use them,” he says. “And sometimes that leads to novel solutions.”

If there was ever a time that marketers and business owners need to hear that advice, it’s now. The uncertain economy has people wondering whether to spend or not to spend on marketing. It seems that Kitundu has the right perspective: reduced tools used with more creativity leads to novel solutions.

Creativity is thus the ultimate commodity in any marketplace, but especially crucial in challenging economic times. With breakthrough creativity, it is actually possible to reduce your marketing spend and achieve bigger and better results.