Internet marketers are nothing if not creative. There hardly seems to be a day that goes by without some new idea from an Internet Marketing brainbox. And each time you think there can’t be any new ideas to market your business online, along comes another creative thinker who has developed an amazing way to promote your products and services.

In business meetings you will often hear people say “we need to think outside the box on this one”. It is a shorthand way of suggesting that the people in the meeting need to be more creative and come up with new and seemingly whacky ideas. And you can bet that many traditionally-based marketing departments are amazed at how much “outside the box” thinking there is in the young upstarts of the Internet Marketing world.

Recently, however, psychologists were interested to find out if by actually being “outside a box” made people think more creatively. The researchers conducted a study which was purportedly looking at different working environments. Some people were sat in a large cardboard box, whereas others were “outside the box”…! The researchers were not actually looking at work productivity or the way people responded to different environments. Instead the psychologists wanted to find out if being in a box hampered creative thinking and if being outside the box actually helped. And amazingly it did…!

When people were inside the box, they were much less creative than when they were, literally, “outside the box”.

So, in order to boost your creative thinking for your internet marketing you could always buy yourself a big cardboard box, do your work in that for a while and then physically step “outside the box” to improve your creativity.

On the other hand, you might want to take a different path to success…! What the research really shows is that a change in environment boosts your creative thinking. So, if  you are struggling with coming up with new ideas for your website, or how to market your online products, you need to get away from your desk. Take a walk, go for a coffee, simply walk to someone else’s office for a chat – all of these are tactics which help improve creative thinking.

In essence, when you are in your office you are in your own little “box” environment – step outside of that box and your creative juices will start to flow again. It all goes to show that there is often some truth in the jargon-laden sayings we hear in the workplace..! Get out of your office for a while and your Internet Marketing will be improved because you will literally be thinking outside of your box.

Related articles

• Thinking outside the box DOES boost creativity: Cramped work spaces produce few ‘lightbulb moments’ for employees (dailymail.co.uk)
• Leave the Room to Boost Creativity [Brain Hack] (lifehacker.com)
• To ‘think outside the box,’ think outside the box (eurekalert.org)