If you’re a movie buff and you’ve seen some good ol’ classics like Goodwill Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, Rain Man, Forrest Gump, and some Indian versions such as My Name is Khan, Barfi, you’ll surely get a clue of what we are talking here. It is indeed about neurodiversity and cultural inclusiveness in our society. This has been widely portrayed in movies, but in real life, do we really do it? This article talks about how important it is, even in the advertising industry (especially in the advertising industry) to have neurodiversity, because great ideas do not belong to one particular race, colour, gender or nationality.
Neuro-what?
Most of us who aren’t aware of the word, tend to use that interchangeably with neuromarketing, neuroscience and neurocognition. Well, this is completely none like them all.
For the uninitiated, neurodiversity (ND) refers to differences in the human brain and their understanding abilities, be it in their social life, learning, attention, mood and other mental functions.
Everybody now agrees to the fact that creativity works for brands. Being innovative works. Constantly making their customers and employees feel a part of a greater cause, works even better. That’s how neurodiversity makes its way into the corporate culture. Conformist companies that deny neurodiversity seldom grow. A lesser intelligent individual in a society is labelled as ‘dumb’ regardless of knowing the person from all levels. This needs to change.
Talk about the recent Pride Month! Brands simply made their logos rainbow-themed without much conviction towards making the LGBTQ+ community feel more inclusive in our society. Only a handful of brands might have taken it seriously, but the rest of them just wanted to feel relevant and “go with the flow”. Recently, a digital pet care startup addressed the elephant in the room and spoke about this. They said, “A rainbow logo won’t change that”, and this was their campaign. They were of the opinion that we need to live Pride 365 days a year and not just for one particular month.
JP Morgan Chase, Ernst & Young, Microsoft, and Google are some of the big names in India and globally that are hiring neurodiverse people into their companies. What does it mean?
Creativity-based Intelligence
For most neurodiverse people, the most common challenge they face is sociability. Blending with people isn’t really their forte. Solely because of this reason (cunningly disguised as an inability to be a part of a team), many neurodiverse employees are rejected at the HR level itself. For a progressive company, it is important to build a culture of empathy before anything else. As brands would like to appeal to customers across all demographics, talent in the workplace should be treated the same way.
“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”
– David Ogilvy
The Father of Advertising himself believed in neurodiversity (rather indirectly) when he quoted this and what he actually meant was – nobody needs to be a great philosopher to be churning out award-winning ideas. Whether it is a fact or a rumour, the story of Colgate is still worth mentioning wherein the company was struggling with sales and none of the big shots were able to come up with a sustainable idea. A simpleton serving tea in their “important meeting” simply suggested increasing the size of the hole from 5mm to 6mm and that brilliant idea increased the sales by 40%. Well, there’s no authenticity to the story, but it is definitely worth inspiring and this is exactly how neurodiversity works.
At 3 Dots Design Pvt. Ltd., we put creativity on top priority. While we understand the fact that every mind processes intelligence at its own pace, it is also important that they are potentially creative in every sense. Being one of the most creative ad agencies in Pune, we have a proud team of content writers, designers, strategists and digital thinkers who constantly thrive to conceptualize meaningful campaigns. If you wish to know more about who we are or what we do, please visit www.3dotsdesign.in or get in touch with us at [email protected]