We all know creativity is vital for good PR. We also know that achieving creativity has been the cause of gallons of ink being spilled over the years.

Within this wealth of advice I think it is safe to conclude that, regardless of which specific techniques you prefer, most people agree that creativity is a process — iterative, interactive, and interconnected.

In short, great ideas don’t just drop out of the sky. You need to work for them.

Understanding your brand, your target audience, and the market landscape are often considered the core raw materials that fuel the creative process. But I think there’s one missing — a secret weapon of creativity that is too often neglected. In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s unfashionable and even frowned upon.

I’m talking about the power of stupid ideas.

The joy of stupid

Let’s be honest, even the best, most insightful audience research or media analysis can still leave you with some quite dry raw materials for the creative process.

The question is how to take those seemingly mundane ingredients and turn them into something exceptional. And my answer to that question is always the same: get stupid.

You may not have realised it when looking at the finished product, but stupid ideas underpin some of the best PR campaigns of recent years. For example:

• Turning an Excel spreadsheet into a music video was definitely a stupid idea, until Spotify smashed it out of the park.

• Buying the world’s least effective billboard was a stupid idea — until it became a multiple award-winning campaign.

• Launching ‘Tinder for cows’ was a really stupid idea — until it became one of the most celebrated B2B PR campaigns of all time.

These campaigns all started with someone’s outlandish, impractical, or just plain ridiculous idea, and it’s that starting point that makes these campaigns stand out. Without that initial spark of stupidity, arguably, those brands would have ended up with something much blander.

Of course, those ideas have been shaped and honed into incredibly powerful PR campaigns because of good creative practices and techniques. I’d go as far as to say that they are all actually a testament to good creative processes because the spirit of that initial stupid thought is still there in the final implementation — it hasn’t been drowned out.

The power of stupid

You may notice all of the examples I’ve quoted above are, very pointedly, B2B PR campaigns. That's because this sort of stupid creativity is still too often assumed to be exclusively for B2C PR. I would argue, however, that stupid ideas can actually be even more powerful in a B2B context.

Yes, there’s the old cliche that B2B is boring and B2C is creative. Frankly, that assumption is the only thing in this article that is stupid.

As my CEO Debby Penton highlighted, yes B2B purchasing can be complex, but that doesn’t mean PR campaigns for B2B companies need to be dry and dull — buying a B2B solution isn’t a decision totally void of emotion.

B2B PR absolutely needs creativity and stupidity. We need to help our clients and brands stand out, to surprise their audiences, to compel people to find out more. Fundamentally, B2B brands need to be memorable.

Give stupid a chance

And yet, in B2B PR and marketing, playing it safe is all too often the name of the game. And that’s the issue. A lot of creative ideas don’t even have a chance to grow and develop because people don’t want to look stupid. But ultimately safe is self-defeating — because safe can never be memorable.

You should have a clearly defined creative process, but ensure that process has been designed to harness, build on, and refine stupid ideas.

And then your biggest, dumbest, stupidest ideas will actually be your perfect campaign.