
The Company Road Podcast E25 Alex Normanton - The courage to craft: navigating creative crossroads
"Mistakes are as valuable as the finely crafted ideas. There's something tangible in them that could often be elevated and be the main idea."
Alex Normanton
In this episode, you’ll hear about:
- Establishing strategic foundations for creativity: Grounding creative ideas in strategy to ensure a solid basis for the creative process and alignment to objectives, prior insights and the broader brief.
- Overcoming creative blocks: Strategies for maintaining optimal mental spaces, getting through blocks of creativity & balancing left and right brain functionalities.
- Being a design-led organisation: Why being design-led is significant and what centering design can do to convey brand values, create meaningful customer experiences and remain flexible and cutting-edge.
- Design for connection & communication: How design goes beyond aesthetics and its powerful role in communicating and connecting with customers.
- Democratisation of design: Ways to involve every part of the company in the design process and why it’s important to do so.
Key Links
Alex's website https://www.alexnormanton.com/
Reckitt https://reckitt.com/
Saatchi & Saatchi https://www.saatchi.com.au/
Clios https://clios.com/
Cannes Lions https://www.canneslions.com/
D&AD https://www.dandad.org/
MassiveMusic https://www.massivemusic.com/
About our guest
Alex Normanton (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexnormanton/) is Global Brand Experience Lead at Reckitt. In this role, Alex drives category growth by translating design into meaningful brand experiences and sustainable innovations.
Prior to this, Alex worked for some of the world’s leading agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi and Design Bridge. He’s directed the likes of Sony Music, Johnnie Walker and Mercedes-Benz, and been recognised by a number of awards such as the Clios, Cannes Lions, D&AD and the One Show.
A big advocate for the power of sonic branding, he believes that audio language should be considered by designers and marketers in the same way that visual and verbal language is. It’s no surprise then that he chose a podcast as the medium for his passion project, DOPA, which fuels conversations around creative wellness.
About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-hudson-7464254/), is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching & consultancy Company Road (www.companyroad.co)
Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.
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