In 1953, Miller Brewing Co. was a tiny enterprise out of Milwaukee. Marketing research, courage, risk-taking, and a brilliant creative idea transformed the brand by celebrating the virtues of America's working class. "Miller Time," a simple, powerful creative image, transformed an inconsequential small business into a billion-a-year brand. Seventeen years later, when Miller abandoned the marketing idea, Budweiser took the abandoned concept, executed it in a fresh way and "This Bud's for You" produced many more billions of dollars for the creatively smart company.

And then there was Ray Kroc, a smart, genial man, who had the idea of creating a chain of clean, hospitable places where people could buy a burger and a drink—a place warmer and more charming than its main competitor, White Castle. But it wasn't until a brilliant young writer at Needham, Harper and Steers in Chicago named Keith Reinhard (the agency morphed into Doyle, Dane and Keith became its legendary chairman) that McDonald's really took flight. Keith and his agency had an extraordinarily creative idea: to position McDonalds as an oasis for mothers and kids, outside the home. They did this by "giving permission" for the 1970s moms to take their kids out for lunch, instead of cooking at home. The magical line "You Deserve a Break Today" helped put many billions of dollars of profit into the pockets of McDonalds shareholders.

With the same kind of simplicity and power, my friend Forest Long, a gifted writer and compassionate human being, came up with the unforgettable line "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" for the United Negro College Fund, helping put hundreds of millions of dollars behind the college educations for thousands of young African American youths.

In all of these instances, a creative idea fused—in the minds and hearts of customers—the identify of a brand with a way of life, an entire attitude toward one's own sense of worth. Creativity found a way for people to think, in a new way, about the importance of their own lives—even in the humble context of selling hamburgers and beer, communication built around that purpose demonstrates creative insight's power to change the way people see their own lives. These advertising campaigns were early, rudimentary, and successful, attempts to create an intimate relationship between a company and its customers, in ways that elevated the significance of a certain brand in that customer's life.

In today's world, we are witnessing many different and far more sophisticated forms of creativity at work in the field of marketing. I would characterize Dell as phenomenally successful at "applied creativity." They spend some $600 million a year to make highly technical improvements against highly segmented target groups: in other words they leverage innovations at Intel and others and find creative ways to tailor that technology to the needs of specific groups of customers, such as students. With individual customers, Dell puts creativity into their hands by allowing them to design their own computers on-line. At the end of the day, to their users, Dell is in perception and fact the best in the business, mostly because it has put creativity at the core of its relationship with its customers. Creativity at Dell has evolved from something that works as the foundation of a marketing campaign into a spirit that lives in every interaction it has with its customers.

The workhorse of the 21st century will be creativity, and management has to create an environment where people can be ready for—and working toward—the breakthrough idea. The question is how to foster the productive creativity needed to differentiate a brand in a surplus economy. America and the rest of the developed world needs to take note: creativity is the force without which our children won't enjoy a standard of living even remotely resembling ours. In the world of excess supply, natural resources, capital and knowledge may let you make the cut into a global economic game—they won't enable you to win it. As we argued earlier, all of these strengths will become commonplace, and where creativity doesn't drive a company's strategic vision, most often the lowest price will be the winning formula. Success, abundance, a rising standard of living—for individuals, companies, communities, nations—will depend on a capacity to create, invent, and innovate.

It comes down to an ability to differentiate your product or service, in a relevant way. This leads inevitably to increased margins and profits. Without differentiation, we lapse back into a world of commodities.