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People don’t often combine creativity, fun and art with the world of motorcycles. The marketing gurus at Yamaha are setting out to change this.

Fun From Yamaha has the standard deliverable for online presence; wallpaper images, photos and games - but they also have a little piece of crafty genius in the form of Papercraft.

Papercraft is often confused with origami, but the difference is very simple. Origami is the art of folding paper to create a form, while papercraft uses color printed templates which are cut and then folded to create a statue. Simply put, papercraft is model building with paper.

As a marketing activity, the papercraft is simply genius. You want people to become intimately familiar with your product. You want people to obsess over it.

Building a model, any model, is a slow and detailed process. You know everything there is to know about your model. You spend hours building your models, it’s an obsessive hobby in its very nature. Papercraft allows Yamaha to give their customers (and potential customers) really cheap models to build.

All that Yamaha has to do is commission a papercraft artist to produce the PDF templates and a few samples. Then post photo’s of the samples and let people download the PDFs. Suddenly, you are giving your fan the ability to build their own Yamaha for the cost of a few color printouts and a couple of evenings spent with paper, glue and scissors.

In addition to Yamaha motorcycle papercraft, which are complicated by their very nature, Yamaha has also posted a series of beginner papercraft projects, each with a separate theme, ranging from animals to seasonal holidays. This gives an educational twist to the whole process and makes them a family project. In a few simple steps, they are building future customers and creating artists at the same time.

Yamaha papercraft is a great example of pushing the boundaries and delivering beyond what is expected. Instead of delivering the standard website deliverables of photos, videos and games, Yamaha took the extra step. They found an emerging art and delivered it to their customers - creating new customers and lifelong fans in the process.

Next time you are running through a checklist for any creative endeavor - instead of filling each box with a check-mark, sit back and think about what you are doing and see if you can add something new to the list.