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Business leaders, in increasing numbers, are looking to the creative power of the arts in their efforts to manage strategic change, to enhance innovation, or to strengthen corporate cultures. In this case study, we focus attention on what is widely regarded as one of the world's most extensive corporate arts‐based learning initiatives, the Catalyst program at Unilever.

In a wide‐ranging interview with James Hill, now a group vice‐president and Catalyst's leading executive sponsor, this paper explores the origins, operations, and outcomes of this innovative program.

Finds that Catalyst came about as a result of savvy leadership and a corporate willingness to take risks in developing an “enterprise culture;” it now flourishes in three divisions due to ownership at multiple levels of the organization as well as its ability to stimulate new product development, attract and retain creative people, and boost the company's marketing efforts; and it persists because its starting points are always actual business problems, the solutions to which improve financial performance and shareholder returns.

To management scholars, this case provides an additional data point in the ongoing study of strategy implementation and organizational change. To corporate executives seeking fresh ideas, the Unilever/Catalyst story offers a novel and intuitively appealing approach to the vexing challenges of leading strategic change, told from the perspective of an experienced executive.

The focus of this paper is the interrogation of an artistic approach with the purpose of understanding entrepreneurial marketing.

This is a conceptual paper although the evaluation is grounded in prior quantitative and qualitative research in entrepreneurial marketing, creativity and art.

An artistic approach to understanding entrepreneurial marketing matches the way in which the owner/manager behaves in practice by constructing a personalised approach to doing marketing.

The paper calls for more creative ways of understanding entrepreneurial marketing. This involves more experimentation in research methodology. The experimental approach also mirrors entrepreneurial marketing practice.

The outcomes address existing theory versus practice gaps so that a more meaningful understanding of entrepreneurial marketing practice can be obtained through the re‐imagining of the entrepreneurial marketer as an artist.

This is an under‐utilised approach to understanding entrepreneurial marketing. The approach matches the wider calls for artistic methods in the wider management academy.