Creative strategy

Merry Baskin Warc Best Practice April 2010

Title: Author(s): Source: Issue:

Creative strategy Merry Baskin Warc Best Practice April 2010

Best practice: Creative strategy

This month Merry Baskin advises on how to develop the creative strategy and outlines the skills that need to be employed in strategic thinking There are many different kinds of strategy: business, marketing, brand, advertising, communications, PR (as well as military), each with their own preceding but interlinked objectives. The ones planners are most likely to encounter are 'communication strategies', 'creative strategies' and 'brand strategies'. What's the difference? Brand strategies are enduring and focus on positioning; creative strategies can change and contain the engaging idea that informs and drives the communications strategy; communications strategies focus on media channel planning to best deliver against the audience. As a general rule of thumb, you have one brand strategy, and you can have many communication and creative strategies. Being able to think strategically is, of course, a key skill. It sets good planners apart from mere (tactical, execution-driven, account manager) mortals. We all need to be excellent strategic thinkers, not only for our clients' benefit (to keep them ahead of their competitors), but also to earn and keep a place for our own agencies and our sector at the top table when advising clients.

SKILLS SET REQUIRED

There are six key requisite strategic skills that I look for in a planner. The first is a natural curiosity for just about anything, but not in the 'butterfly' mind sense. Next is rigorous thinking, an ability to worry about a topic until it's been cracked. Insight and empathy go hand in hand with each other both are indicative of an ability to look at a problem from many sides.
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Planners must also demonstrate a streak of practicality striving for a viable solution is more desirable than an academic, intellectually stimulating angle that is simply not executable. Finally, the possession of a colourful imagination. It's no good just looking to the past for the answer, planners need kaleidoscopic minds to help see around corners too. So, parallel use of both left and right brain, analytical and imaginative thinking will sort the strategic wheat from the tactical chaff and get you from wannabe to strategic planner. This is all a bit of a tall order perhaps, especially for a junior planner or a graduate trainee, as much of this comes with experience. My advice to anyone out there looking to transfer to planning or get an upgrade is to arm yourself with a set of strategic principles, a step-by-step process, and some tools and techniques that you can apply to just about any marketing situation or brand, to render yourself invaluable. Know the difference between a strategy and an objective. It is surprising to me how often people conflate 'strategy' and 'objective'. Obviously one follows on from the other, but you can't develop a strategy until you have identified your objectives. One is what you want to achieve, the other is how you are going to achieve it. Knowing what it is you want to do is the first essential step. You can't define the best role for communication (and creativity within it) unless you really understand the business context behind your brand plan. You need to do your homework and ground the project in the business reality of the brand. Identify the challenges it is facing and the business goals and strategies designed to redress them. Figure out why your client thinks these goals are important, whether it is to create a good return for shareholders in the short term or building long-term, future-proof customer relationships. Establish what success looks like and define it quite precisely. From there you should be able to identify the purpose of the brand and from that the role that communications can play in helping the brand deliver against its objectives. Or, if indeed, whether communications can help at all. At this point, you can start writing your creative strategy. Avoid 'fat' words 'strategy' and 'creative' and 'ideas' are big, important-sounding words, but what do we actually mean when we say them? We bandy them around and think everyone will know what we mean whereas their definition of the same words may be quite different. A shared vocabulary is key.

STEPS IN DEVELOPING THE CREATIVE STRATEGY

1. Identify the client's business objective if this isn't part of your original brief from the client, go and find it out. It's usually written by the board or the financial director and usually has some financial goals attached for example, in 2005, UK supermarket giant Sainsbury's said they wanted to increase revenue by 2.5 billion over the next three years. 2. The marketing goals and strategies will fall out of the business ones. In this instance, the obvious one would be to try and steal market share by persuading other supermarket shoppers to switch to Sainsbury's by encouraging trial through various special offers. The challenge will be in converting trial to loyalty over subsequent visits. 3. Define your communications objective the role for communications is therefore probably one of persuading non-users to think differently about Sainsbury's, to change their behaviour as a result of these attitudes and then come to Sainsbury's for their main shop.

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4. Identify the barriers preventing you from achieving it use research to establish what the competitor's (Tesco) customers currently think of Sainsbury's and why they don't go there. 5. Feed your head (try the warc.com database for starters). How has the recession impacted people's attitudes and behaviours in supermarket shopping? What are the trends and drivers in the market? Develop and hone your consumer insights about shoppers. 6. Figure out what you have in your arsenal to overcome the barriers in the case of supermarket marketing there are all sorts of stories to be told price, range, promotions, loyalty cards, location, service and the like. 7. Develop various hypothetical solutions and research them. For example, conduct interviews with a variety of supermarket customer segments, the existing and competitive customers, heavy and light, loyal and promiscuous, young and old, families and single person households. 8. Refine your creative strategy and how it should work using your findings. 9. Write your creative brief out the boxes with care and aplomb make every word count. Remember that less is more, and the more you refine and cut, the more focused and effective it is likely to be. Make sure you have a really compelling, single-minded proposition. 10. Do some clever thinking around channel choice for delivering it. Clever thinking right at the start of the communications planning process, from the consumer end of the telescope, will pay off with dividends. This is a logical, linear 10-point checklist and the various responses illustrated are quite conventional. In fact, what the advertising agency's strategist really did to crack Sainsbury's 2.5 billion objective was considerably more creative, analytical and clever. It makes for a classic case history on how to develop a business-changing, idea-based, creative strategy and you can check it out on warc.com, 'Sainsbury's: It's always worth trying something new'.

STRATEGIC TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

Planning creative strategy is essentially asking and answering a series of interlinked questions,. Where one builds upon another. The classic example has already been referred to in a recent Best Practice article on 'Briefing your agency' (Admap February 2010) The Stephen King Planning Cycle which asks: Where are we now? Why are we there? Where could we be? How do we get there? Are we getting there? There are plenty of strategic tools and brand models out there and they can form a sound basis for creative strategy development. Try and find one that suits your temperament and style. Essentially, Brand Onions, Brand Keys, Brand Pyramids, Brand Funnels and the like are all doing pretty much the same thing: making coherent links between customer and brand, category and business. Other tools include the Brand Lifecycle Curve and Challenger brand theories where your brand fits and how can it break the cycle which is good stuff if you are working on an established brand. Don't forget the classic SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, which never fails to stimulate and
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provoke. Almost every box yields a potential strategy. Strategic thinking techniques, such as benefit laddering and mind maps, are great ways of stretching your mind and getting you out of a rut.

TOP TIPS
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Spend as much time nailing the problem as you do developing the strategic solution Ensure the flow from business objective through to the marketing strategy to the communications plan and creative brief is seamless and interlinked.

A creative strategy has to be both challenging and compelling to the target in order to be effective. Make sure it is also distinct from the competition. As well as true to the brand/product.

FURTHER READING ON WARC.COM

How market leaders can become challenger brands once more by Adam Morgan, Market Leader, Q4 2009 Strategies from a new generation of challenger brands by Adam Morgan, Market Leader, Q1 2009 Improving Advertising Decisions by Stephen King, Admap, April 1977 APG Creative Planning Awards winners: Sainsbury's: It's always worth trying something new, 2007; HEA drugs education: An inside job, 1997; Compaq costs you less than cheaper computers, 1997; Honda: Hate doesn't always suck ass, 2005; Corsodyl: Would you ignore this? 2007. Using Projective Laddering by Anders A Rasmussen, ESOMAR 1999 Mind mapping. A new way to understand brands by Rudolf Sommer, ESOMAR 1996 The Brand Anniversary Model by Doron BenShaul, ESOMAR Qualitative Research, Boston, November 2002 Brand Management Models (www.warc.com/brandmodels) for the full available collection of brand models

OTHER READING
Communication Strategy Best Practice Guide IPA/ISBA/MCCA/PRCA 2007 Excellence in Advertising by Leslie Butterfield

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