Creative Strategy and the Business of Design

by Douglas Davis

  Here is how you’ll be able to propose additional ideas or ask the right questions to align brand, target, and channel.

  A PURCHASE FUNNEL

  CONSIDER THE MARKETING GOALS

  Choose your channel based on the marketing goals stated by the client. They likely fit into one of the categories in the purchase funnel: Awareness, Research, Engagement, Convert (Purchase), Post Purchase..., and Advocacy. For example:

  If your client or marketing department wants Engagement, you propose concept and execution ideas that will get them likes, tweets, reviews, and forwards.

  If the goal is Awareness, then you’ll want to propose mass media touchpoints like Out of Home, broadcast, print, radio, etc.

  Often, there must be multiple impressions or different forms of contact with your message for it to become top-of-mind and get some sort of response from a consumer. Each customer journey can depend on a number of variables. This is the objective of the funnel—to push as many people through the stages of the funnel, from prospect to customer to advocate. When you know what the suits are thinking, you can do what you do best—create engaging experiences in the appropriate medium.

  For instance, an Amazon customer will most likely order stuff, and therefore the shipping box would be a great place for speaking to that customer (and all those along the way). The little yellow Minions with the big glasses were featured on the outside of shipping boxes with the Amazon Prime logo when their new movie was released. Since the customer is anticipating whatever he or she ordered, any sales messaging materials that ride along with what was ordered would most likely get more attention than the same thing sent regular mail. To take it further, if Amazon wanted to increase Prime memberships, regular Amazon customers would be the biggest opportunity to upsell. The ride-along postcards or brochures inside could make the customers aware of the service, make a special offer, or drive traffic to the website to close the deal.

  FURTHER READING

  In Brand Portfolio Strategy, David A. Aaker provides a wealth of in-depth specifics on creating brand relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity. These will help you determine what creative approaches you may be able to take depending on what is best for the brand you are servicing.

  TACTICAL OPTIONS

  How to Build a Scenario Analysis

  After you’ve done the research to create a brand ladder, written a positioning statement, and considered what channels are appropriate for your targets, you can start to think through your scenario analysis. This is a way to play out the potential risks and rewards of going with a particular option. As we discussed in Chapter 2, providing a tactical solution to a strategic request doesn’t really solve the problem. Even if it does solve the immediate problem, it lacks the analysis that covers the scenarios the product or service will need to address in the short- or long-term future.

  DOING WHAT WE’VE ALWAYS DONE

  Let’s say the client requested a new logo, and it is time for you to present your options. It’s essentially a choice between the Black, Orange, and Gray options. In that scenario, the premise of the choice we present the client with is: Which one do you like better? Some would argue that no matter what they pick, the client is right because they are paying . . . but to them, I would say the premise of the argument is wrong because it doesn’t include what’s right for the target on behalf of the brand.

  In this situation, you’re offering three logo options for one price. There is no strategy behind the options; they’re just creative choices.

  USING A STRATEGIC APPROACH IN YOUR SCENARIO ANALYSIS

  Instead of a standard tactical approach, your pitch could look like this.

  STRATEGIC OPTIONS

  This is essentially the one job/three design options/for one price model as it is currently practiced, and it doesn’t guard against anyone offering better or cheaper design. However, offering strategy in the form of scenarios not only differentiates your offering, it leads the client by addressing the real business or marketing problem.

  What we show here are three different options, all based on different strategic answers to the business and marketing objectives. Each option requires various positioning strategies, different channels, and a different scope of work, and thus has a different price point. This method helps you lead clients to smart business decisions by clearly connecting the target, product/service benefits, and business objectives.

  The scenario analysis is where all your hard work culminates—the time you spent getting to know your target, learning the history of the brand, teasing out benefits, learning specific marketing objectives, building relevant messaging. Show the client that you are doing more than throwing options out there—you’re building a strategic plan for the brand or service.

  With this method, your action plan (the itemized list of details, resources, metrics, and phases you would suggest that they implement) is well thought out. No matter what the client chooses, you’ve increased the overall value of each recommendation on all sides because of your analysis.

  Turning Words Into Inspiration

  Turning all of your research and insights into actionable ideas is one of the key parts of thinking strategically. Writing a positioning statement and scenario analysis that capture the strategy behind your solutions will help you lead the client toward success in the short and long term.

  Choose relevant channels based on your target’s behaviors and preferences combined with the marketing goals.

  The identity, tone, and values of a brand help make it recognizable.

  Consider the phases of the purchase funnel or customer journey and how to best meet your target where they are.

  In your positioning statement, be sure the point of difference, end benefit, and reason to believe are rooted in research and not opinion.

  10 Where’s the Map?

  11 Questions a Creative Brief Should Answer

  Sitting there with my mouth wide open and the brief in my hand, I wondered aloud in disbelief, “Really. I’m supposed to develop a rich media digital campaign for a rheumatoid arthritis drug and there’s no target information in the brief.” Sure, I could guess, but wow, why even go through the motions of having a brief if it’s not going to be useful? As the new guy on this account I was the second art director on this campaign. My in-house competition had worked on this brand at this agency for a few years. Awesome. As I sat there without any guidance from the strategy guy or information on where these ads would be seen (or if the target even used the Internet in light of their pain), my grandmother came to mind. As long as I could remember, we all knew she suffered from severe arthritis in her legs but she never complained. She would state softly in between jokes, a day or so before it would rain, “Ol’ Arthur’s acting up again.” We could tell she was visibly in pain almost all the time as she rubbed her knees, but it was especially clear on those days. She would describe the sensation as “It kinda feels like they’re in hot water, they just burn.”

  From there I fashioned an insight that people at this point in their lives owned their situation. They were living with the pain daily and it was as real a presence in their life as their grandchildren. It was personal, persistent, and painful, yet they had accepted the pain and learned to live with their condition. That led me to the visual concept that focused on beautifully photographed details of the affected areas such as hands and knees. Though I’m not a writer, I wrote a few lines I designed as quotes focusing on a day in the life of those living with the pain. It’s all I had and my rationale to this point won the creative director, as she thought about the nickname her grandmother had given some condition she had as well. After a few days of client deliberation on the agency’s two recommendations—the beautifully designed ads from my in-agency competition and my simple campaign—they rejected them both.

  Why We Need Briefs

  You may be able to recall many situations like this one, where you weren’t set up to win because of incomplete information. How many times ha
ve you had no idea what to do because the brief was either full of worthless information or so vague you were better off before you read it? I’ve been there myself. I’ll reference Truth, Lies & Advertising author and account planner Jon Steel throughout this chapter. His take on the brief is the single best-articulated view I’ve seen in my career. On page 172 he states:

  “There is only one reason for anyone to write a brief or engage in briefing a creative team, and that is to help make their advertising better (and easier to create) than it would be if they were left to their own devices. As such, it is a means to an end: the creation of a distinctive and relevant advertising campaign.”

  We will focus solely on the parts of a classic brief in this chapter. You’ll find various tools that (combined with any given information from the client) will enable you to develop your own brief if necessary.

  In chapter 5 of Truth, Lies & Advertising, Steel lays out three objectives that are the goals of a good brief.

  “First, it should give the creative team a realistic view of what their advertising needs to, and is likely to, achieve. Second, it should provide a clear understanding of the people that their advertising must address, and finally, it needs to give clear direction on the message to which the target audience seems most likely to be susceptible.”

  Even if you aren’t in advertising, this information is still relevant. Your design will have goals to achieve, is meant for a specific target, and will need to communicate visually and verbally. If you are given a brief, it should sufficiently cover the content I’ll discuss. If it doesn’t, you may have difficulty creating viable solutions to the client problem. This chapter will give you a guide to what clarifying questions you can ask to develop the brief you’re given to a more complete state.

  Different Types of Briefs

  Each organization is unique in the briefing process. Each project’s scope and objective will require unique considerations that will tailor a brief to a specific communications problem. That’s why:

  A brand built from scratch will need a more comprehensive brief than an initiative from an existing campaign.

  A digital brief will have different language than an outdoor campaign brief.

  Design briefs may be different than advertising campaign briefs.

  You’ve figured and experienced that much. I’ll be talking you through the framework of the transferable portions of a brief and the information needed to solve any problem.

  The brief is where the specifics of the previous chapters come together. When sitting down to write a brief, you’ll need a clearly defined goal or goals, a narrowly defined target, and some insight into what the target wants.

  1. How would you describe the product?

  Adman Peter Nivio Zarlenga said it best when he stated, “In our factory, we make lipstick. In our advertising, we sell hope.” This section must answer the question, “What are we selling?” both literally and figuratively. On the surface, it may be a hair-growth formula for men, and underneath the surface it may be liquid confidence. You can pinpoint underlying motivations using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (See Chapter 1 for more information.) Using this hierarchy to describe the underlying motivation for buying the product will frame this in an interesting way for those reading the brief.

  2. What is the assignment?

  The assignment can be described in tactical executions, strategic approach, or exactly as the client articulated from the RFP. Decide what is best according to the situation, but what the client has set out to accomplish must be crystal-clear in this section. Articulate both primary and secondary objectives here.

  It’s a good idea to look back at the signed proposal and scope of work while doing this to make sure that scope creep hasn’t hijacked the project. If this ends up sounding like way too tall an order, or if something is out of balance, it’s best to clarify now. Detail any phases, additions, or subtractions in the client wish list as well. Be brief yet specific enough not to be vague. A thorough job in this section will help you tackle step 11.

  SPEND TIME HERE TO AVOID OBSTACLES LATER

  It’s my experience that when you find out you weren’t even in the ballpark at the presentation or encounter insurmountable baggage as a response to some visual approach, section 3 wasn’t properly discussed.

  3. What is the background?

  After reading this section, you should have an overview of the context that the product or brand is experiencing. If you’re working on a design or a campaign for a food company that has just had a product recall because someone was sickened, you need to know that. It will shape the mindset of those you’ll have to pitch your creative solution to.

  Find out how the client defined success in previous initiatives. Uncover why the product is being relaunched and what approaches fell flat when they were tried in the past. Save yourself big headaches and delve into the marketing or business history of the brand or product here.

  This is also the spot to include a written analysis of the top three competitors. Doing so will help frame the product or service within the context of the client’s competitive set. Is this a challenger brand or a leader in the category? Answer this with prose. Bullet points won’t work at all in a brief. A random list of things about each competitor won’t give you a real understanding of what aspect of your business a particular rival competes with. (Example: If your product is better but their service outshines that fact, this should be communicated.) Links to or samples of their existing creative solutions should be included for reference.

  4. Whom are we selling to?

  Spending time getting to know your target is so important. Once you craft target segments, you can begin to find directional insights embedded in their demographic, psychographic, or behavioral aspects. Your channel recommendations, benefits, and messaging will all need to connect very closely to your target. If your brief doesn’t define targets clearly or completely enough, you’ll find yourself struggling with all phases of the creative solutions.

  Chapter 7 discussed defining target segments, and with those concepts in mind, let’s think through segmentation. Remember, segmentation is dividing your target into groups based on such characteristics as demographics, the target’s life stage, psychographics (the study of a target’s interests, attitudes, and opinions), and the behaviors and actions a target takes.

  After proving that the target exists and is viable through quantitative data pointing to their behavior, we then must warm up the cold data by painting a picture of the people the data represent. Choose a character from a TV show, movie, or your family who would best represent the target and create a persona. (This is where all that time spent watching TV comes in handy!) For example, imagine if Phil Dunphy from ABC’s Modern Family embodied your target: a middle-aged, married real estate agent with three kids. His quirky personality and house in the suburbs would make it easier when formulating a concept, visual execution, and media channel approach to selling him a car.

  Or what if Wilma Flintstone was most representative of your ideal target when selling a point-and-shoot camera. You know that this married woman likes jewelry, owns her own home, has a car, and goes out with her neighbors. You’d know that she has one child and as a result would have many family and social events to capture, document, and share.

  Choose three of your favorite characters from movies, TV shows, or cartoons. Who of the three would be best to sell a high-end Dyson vacuum cleaner, a tandem bike, or a laptop computer, and why?

  5. What is the one main benefit of this product?

  This is where you articulate the selling proposition unique to this product or service. Put yourself in the customers’ shoes and determine what’s in it for them. For creatives, the relevant part to take away from this section is that the client, account, marketing, and business departments are looking for visual and verbal messaging that differentiates the product from its competitors. It’s obvious that consumers comparison shop to find the best value for their money; to help you arti
culate that, you’ll need features and benefits. A feature is what a brand or product is. A corresponding benefit is what that product or brand does for its target audience. See Chapter 5 for more information on features and benefits.

  When looking at your phone, its touch screen, front-facing camera, storage capacity, and network are all features. These features enable specific benefits such as speed, ease of use, a visual and verbal conversation, the freedom to take photos while listening to music, or the ability to make a video and upload it. It’s important to exhaust all these features and identify the corresponding benefits to the target that those features make possible. From this exercise, your team will uncover how the product or service is unique from its competitors. Determine which single benefit is most important or relevant to the target. Sometimes this will be obvious based on the objective the client is trying to achieve. When the main benefit is presented clearly, it becomes easier for a potential customer to determine how one product may be better than another.

  6. What are the reasons to believe?

  You should find focused selling points in this section. These should be tangible product or service features that will justify why someone should listen. Thanks to people like you and me, we all are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages daily. When the design of an ad or the concept gets your target’s attention, you’d better have something true to say. Format will dictate how much more you can communicate past your one main benefit (think 30-second spots versus brochure versus website).