Conducting a creativity audit

A creativity audit can help you see whether you’re taking the right creative approach for your audience and for the brand image and persona you want to convey. Respond to each of the statements in Table 8-1 as honestly as you can with a yes or no answer. At the end, if you have more negative responses than positive ones, it may be time to rethink your approach to creative.

As this audit indicates, a brand’s creative is always evolving and changing. If you delay making creative plans and appropriate updates, you can actually lose brand appeal while competitors gain appeal, even with no product or pricing changes. Your creative makes big statements about your product value, relevance, quality, and more.

Questioning (almost) everything

Just because something seems to be working doesn’t mean it is. You need to continuously come up with new creative, test new copy and visual ideas, and keep repeating your efforts to find new champions for response and results.

The first step in developing successful creative is to question everything about your status quo. Start with the following:

• Why did you choose your current logo and brand colors? Do they convey the right image and mood for today’s consumers? Or do they reflect your mood at the time you chose them?
• What characteristics and values are you presenting with your brand’s creative assets? Are they in line with the characteristics of the customers you seek the most?
• What is the creative energy and appeal projected by your competitors?
• How old is your creative style and current persona? Do you need a refresh to attract new generations? How can you do so without losing your appeal to older customers?
• Do your customer experiences reflect the energy and moods of the creative elements you present across channels?

Take stock of what your competitors are doing. Chances are, they are testing their creative to see what continues to work best for them, and if you’re targeting the same consumers, you may discover a few things.

Create a spreadsheet that outlines your creative elements, persona, and messaging and that of your competitors. Comparing your approach to others, especially successful brands that have been in your space for a while, will help you see what type of persona you need to appeal to, which elements seem to draw attention, and how you can be alike but different at the same time.

Building your creative elements

All aspects of your brand’s creative need to reflect the values, personalities, attitudes, and interests of your core audience. Every element must speak to your customers’ hearts and minds to capture their attention and get them to engage — two important yet difficult-to-achieve aspects of marketing success.

Your creative strategy is a manifestation of your marketing strategy and plan. If your strategy is to appeal to a specific market segment, your creativity needs to follow suit. For example, if your top consumer segment is millennial males, you may want to develop creative imagery and styles that appeal to the values that research shows matter to this group:

• Happiness drivers: Freedom, self-expression, adventure, innovation, and justice
• Values: Minimalism, friendships, technology, experiences, excitement, and authenticity
• Entertainment: Fast-paced action, dynamism, bold colors, and video blogs

If your customer profiles (discussed in Chapter 6) include attributes associated with actual customers and segment personas, you will be more prepared to develop compelling creative that appeals to the psychology of choice. Otherwise, your creative may be interesting and clever but not as likely to boost your bottom line.

Coloring your creative psychologically

The fact that color influences people’s moods, productivity, and even appetite is nothing new. Researchers have been proving this over and over again for years. The fact that many marketers don’t pay more attention to these findings is what’s amazing. Here are just a few colorful facts that can change your attitude toward engagement, response, and return on investment:

• Research conducted by the Color Communications Innovations Institute for Color Research and the University of Winnipeg shows that within 90 seconds most people make an unconscious judgment about something’s value and trustworthiness, and between 60 and 90 percent of that judgment is based on color.
• Studies from the Color Association of the United States have found that blue is a good color to calm people and make them stay longer and hopefully order more when dining out.
• Red is known to increase heart and respiratory rates and appetite. Some color theorists suggest red décor is a bad choice for restaurants that want customers to linger longer and eat more, but a good choice for fast-food establishments that want to stimulate the energy that triggers appetite while customers are standing in line to order.

The importance of color for brand identity and marketing materials goes far beyond the physiological effect on appetite and food consumption. As a marketer, you should be familiar with how your brand identity (and its corresponding colors) influences your customers.

Using brand iconology

Dictionary.com defines iconology as “the historical analysis and interpretive study of symbols and images.” For marketers, iconology refers to the colors, symbols, and persona that define your brand. Your choices need to reflect the images and colors that best fit the persona, lifestyle, and attitudes of your core customers.

Leading brands spend a great deal of energy finding specific hues to represent their brand. Because colors have many shades, invest time to find the hues that best align with your customers and the energy you need to create to attract notice and engagement.

Most brands choose a primary color and secondary colors that complement it. Many also select the gray and black tones they want associated with their brand. To see which colors top global brands use, visit www.brandcolors.net. You can view the specific color codes for the logos you know best, including Microsoft, Delta, and Coca-Cola.

Beyond colors, your brand standards need to include the fonts you want to convey your brand. Do you prefer serif fonts or sans serif? Serif fonts, like Times New Roman, have been found to produce better recall and comprehension.

Fonts, like colors, should be consistent across all signage, imagery, ads, promotions, and channels. They represent a tone and persona just like your colors do and need to be defined. Some fonts increase readership and message recall more than others when used for body text. For your logo, you can be more creative. Just keep it simple, readable, and aligned with your strategy.

Fonts are more of an art form than you may realize. For a small fee, you can access many unique and artistic fonts beyond those available in your word processing program. Make sure you talk to your designer about font choices and pay for the rights to a font if necessary.

Readability is the main criteria when choosing fonts for your graphic standards across advertising and marketing materials, online and off-line. Too fancy or too faint of a font makes reading your material more difficult, which can cause readers to check out.

Check out Figure 8-2 to see some free fonts from Microsoft Word that spark creativity for logos, iconology in ads, and digital assets.

Before building your marketing campaigns to sell products or increase awareness, establish graphic standards for your brand and all your products and communications channels to ensure consistency for the images you present and the moods and attitudes you create.

Writing words that work

A few proven words like Free and Top Quality or statements like Endorsed by Moms used to be all you needed to get attention, response, and sales. Case in point: Trident, the top selling chewing gum in the U.S. in 2013 according to Statista, was long known as the sugarless chewing gum “four out of five dentists surveyed recommend.”

With the average person seeing thousands of ads daily, your marketing content needs words that stir up so much interest, need, or curiosity that readers are compelled to dig deeper on your website or click from your banner ad, to your web page, all the way through to the shopping cart and checkout page.

The best way to capture attention and inspire engagement is to ask leading questions that your brand can answer or resolve, or make statements that present direct value. Examples include:

• Would you like to increase sales by 20 percent without spending more money?
• Are you struggling to increase web traffic?
• 3 questions to ask customers that will increase their loyalty for life

Many marketers have resorted to misleading headlines in ads and on social media pages that bait people to click and read more about an interesting topic, only to make them sort through dozens of ads to get to the lackluster information behind the headline. We see these online bait-and-switch tactics all the time: “You won’t believe what happens next,” “These child actors died before 21,” or “You’ll never recognize her now.” Clickbait that serves up ads instead of substantial content does little more than set your brand up to lose consumers’ trust and respect. However, sparking curiosity and then delivering honest, actionable content that helps consumers get information they need or make wise choices is not only acceptable; it’s also highly effective.

The best marketing copy uses words to create feelings that move people to act. If you want to ease someone’s mind, you can say, “Relax. With our help, you’ve got this.” These words aren’t likely to top a list of best advertising words, yet they engage people’s emotions and set their minds at ease.

The most powerful words known to more than double consumer response are but you are free (see the nearby sidebar “The power of “free”). Why? These four simple words empower consumers to make their own informed choices and minimize the sales pressure, and when brands make that happen, they build trust, which often leads to engagement, sales, and loyalty.

Involving, informing, and inspiring people to make their own choices works because consumers have been oversold with hype for years. Most people no longer believe the fine print that states, “Only one left in stock” or “One seat left at this price,” because they find the same price offered the next day — and the next. And Black Friday deals are no longer as strong a motivator as in the past because everyone knows that there’ll be another sale in a matter of days or weeks. When people feel happy and confident about their brand choices, they transfer those good feelings to those brands. As a result, the brands’ logos, colors, slogans, and so on become symbols of trust and good energy.

The driving goal of your creative strategy should be to tap into the psychology of color and imagery in ways that make your logo and graphics, beacons of trust, belonging, and happiness. The words you use need to be carefully chosen to support the trust you project visually.

Bottom line: Your creative has to appeal to the intellect, self-confidence, aspirations, and wannabe personas of your target customers. That’s no small task, but if you follow the guidelines in this chapter (and book), you can master the right message and emotional appeal, and boost your ability to grow your business.

Goals

Define what you want to accomplish with your creative strategy and every piece you create for your marketing programs. If you don’t have a destination in mind, you can’t map out the journey. List the goals you hope to accomplish and make them measurable and real. Assigning one strong and spot-on objective for each piece you create is more effective than assigning multiple goals, which can confuse consumers and weaken offers.

Your goals will vary. For example, not all ads should be about driving imminent sales. You also need to set and achieve goals around building awareness for your brand’s positioning, identity and long-term value so that you can be more successful in both your acquisition and your retention efforts.

Offers and promises

What is the promise you’re making about your product or your brand? What is the offer for each specific campaign? Your promise and offer are not the same thing. Offers change often and promises not so much, yet they need to support each other.

For example, your offer may be “Buy One, Get One Free,” and your promise may be personalized care, a money-back guarantee, and extraordinary service. Each marketing piece you create needs to include a relevant offer backed up by your brand’s overall promise.

Supporting statements

Your brand’s promise needs to be backed up by supporting evidence. If you are in retail and your promise is customer satisfaction, use testimonials or cite your Net Promoter Score (a measure of customer experience discussed in Chapter 5) to validate your promise that customers give your products and overall experience high ratings.

Another validation of customer satisfaction is your return customer rate. If you have data that shows a large percentage of your customers are repeat customers, share that information as well.

Tone or persona

Every brand reflects a personality, energy, and tone that consumers identify with — or don’t. These qualities are part of your brand persona, which also should reflect your values, interests, and attitudes as well as those of your core customer.

For example, Apple appeals to a specific personality that embraces innovation, self-expression, freedom, spunk, creativity, and individuality. These values largely appeal to consumers between the ages of 15 and 50. At one point, Apple ads featured silhouettes of people jumping, dancing, and doing other happy activities. These ads created a mood that people wanted to experience.

Emotional drivers

If you haven’t already created ESP profiles for your customers, consider bookmarking this page and flipping to Chapter 2 to do it now. Having ESPs handy as you read this section will help you get the most out of it.

Review the top emotions that influence choices in your category for your core customers and include key insights in your creative brief, such as the following:

• Which emotions are associated with purchases in your product category?
• Do you need to minimize customers’ fear and anxiety or build on their expectations for joy and security?
• What promises can you make about the emotional fulfillment your product and brand can deliver?
• Do consumers easily trust your category? How can you get around industry trust issues?
• What are some of the influencers of choice among your customers? Social proof? Authorities? List these influencers as specifically as possible and include ideas for addressing them in your marketing copy and imagery.
• What are the disconnects around your product category or brand? Do you sell life insurance and need to make people face the reality that they will someday die and may leave their family compromised as a result? Do you sell weight-loss programs and want people to accept that they may need professional help?

Wannabe profiles

Appealing to the current identity of your customers isn’t enough; you also have to appeal to their wannabe identity. All young adults have a vision of who they want to be in the near and long-term future. This vision usually projects their future self doing something on their bucket list that’s out of the norm, or working in a successful career or owning their own business and living their dream. On the flip side, many middle-aged and older adults have an image of what they once were or wish they had been when they were young and had more agility and freedom.

Tap into these visions of wannabe personas in your marketing campaigns to attract and capture the attention and interest of your targeted consumers. Large brands with large research teams do a great job of staying on top of multiple wannabe personas and creating graphics, imagery, and customer experiences accordingly.

Color palette

Browse the Pantone Matching System (PMS) codes for colors that fit the creative strategy you are developing for your brand. The PMS codes provide a universal approach to identifying and communicating colors for printing. PMS color codes are also used to ensure consistency across your digital channels.

Be sure to list all the PMS codes for your logo and supporting iconology in your graphic standards documentation so that anyone helping create designs, marketing materials for any format and channels can do so with consistency and accuracy.

Golden triangle pattern

When it comes to print materials, people’s eye-flow patterns aren’t that much different from their eye flow on digital screens. People tend to first glance in the upper-left corner, move to the upper-right corner, take a sharp diagonal to the left margin, and then glance downward. This pattern is called the golden triangle. Whatever format your marketing campaign takes — digital or print — direct your designer to place the key messages, offers, and calls to action in the golden triangle for higher visibility, recall, and response. Chapter 12 has more information about how people view website pages.

Constraints

Perhaps you face budgetary constraints or need to avoid certain terms, concepts, or images that your competitors have already used. Be sure to give your constraints careful thought and list them as clearly as possible. These constraints should be documented in a brand style guide to ensure that designers you hire, and team members across your organization, adhere to consistent presentation of your brand.

Constraints can address your branding guidelines as well as apply to an individual campaign. A good place to start when crafting a single campaign or company-wide guidelines is to ask yourself the following questions:

• Are there actions a designer can’t take with your logo, like change the color?
• Are you trying to avoid looking like a particular competitor?
• Do you have to have vector art (art based on mathematical equations) so that all images can be scaled up for big posters and scaled down for a blog or web page?
• Is it important to produce work that can be shown both in full color and in black and white, depending on the medium and variations in your budget, or can be adapted easily from a still image to an animated one?
• Do you have the rights to use all the images, fonts, and trademarks you’ve selected?

Prepare a graphics standards guide that sets forth your color palette, fonts, logo usage, and other elements to ensure that all team members preparing creative for any channel adhere to the same guidelines for a strong and consistent brand presentation.

Execution

Your creative brief needs to cover execution across all channels as well. Given all the online and off-line marketing formats brands use today that need to be adapted for each targeted customer segment, repurposing content quickly and affordably for various channels is key.

Many digital asset management software platforms enable automatic customization of marketing and promotional materials for use across various channels. These tools allow marketers to create a template for a given campaign and very quickly and easily adapt the content — message, visuals, languages, and so on — for various formats across print and digital channels. Look for software that enables you to adapt quickly for all the channels you use, including digital, social media, point of sale, and print (ads, posters, bus boards, and so on). To find current offerings in this space, enter “digital asset management software” into your web browser and research the best options for your price and budget.

If you are marketing to populations using different languages or to global markets, it’s important to include marketing asset management and content adaptation in your creative plan to allow you to get campaigns to market quickly and to save you a lot of money. Manually adapting each format for each campaign will require a lot of hours, which can delay getting a campaign to market. And if you’re paying an agency or a freelance designer to adapt your promotional material for print, Facebook ads, banner ads, bus boards, and so on, the changes can be expensive.

Don’t assume that you can’t afford automated creative technology. Many systems and many price points are available, and in most cases, you can access this type of technology on a subscription or per-user, per-month basis, making it affordable to access the same kind of services your bigger competitors use to improve their efficiencies.

Knowing in advance which channels you’ll use for your marketing pieces gives structure to your ideas and sets a framework for execution. Planning ahead to adapt for various channels ensures consistency for customers who see your ads in print or online.

Creativity and product development

It goes without saying that new products must be innovative to stand out. And it often takes a team over an individual to identify successful new products. A product development team brings together experts with diverse perspectives and functions, like sales and marketing paired with manufacturing and engineering.

Involving diverse team members and even outside partners, suppliers, or customers in product development from the beginning helps you fine-tune ideas and secures ownership throughout the organization, which can lead to faster and smoother approval processes.

When you’re discussing ideas for new products, it’s important to keep in mind the needs of your target consumers and potential voids in your market you can fill. For example:

• What problem are you trying to solve?
• Which past products are you trying to improve?
• What’s missing in your product category that can make lives easier?

If you let creativity overrule practicality, you may create a new product that’s fun to imagine but not something consumers think is worth spending money on — like battery-operated marshmallow-roasting sticks, Cheetos-flavored lip balm, or Harley-Davidson perfume. You don’t want a product that ends up in the cemetery of products with short life spans.

Additional examples of product flops include Colgate’s frozen entrees, Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt shampoo, and Heinz’s colored ketchup (yes, these were real products). Perhaps we just can’t wrap our heads around the thought of eating meals that taste like toothpaste, rubbing food into our hair, or eating blue ketchup with fries.

Be creative and think of new ways to solve real problems. But don’t wander too far outside your core product areas, because consumers often fail to connect with products that seem too distant from the expertise they perceive for your brand.

Simple ways to spark new ideas

Creativity isn’t a science. It’s the product of our imagination, individuality, and ability to look at a routine situation differently and then communicate a new idea for addressing it in a meaningful manner. Many times, new ideas come from soaking up information, researching what others are doing, questioning the problem, looking at issues from an emotional angle rather than a functional one, tossing ideas back and forth with an associate, and then experimenting until something relevant sticks.

Here are some ideas that can help you engage your imagination to come up with new ways to tell your brand story and enhance your product appeal.