Creative Strategy: Planning and Development

What is creativity?

From Human Motivation, 3rd ed., by Robert E. Franken - “Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others.” 

Advertising Creativity

Advertising creativity is the ability to generate fresh, unique, and appropriate ideas that can be used as solutions to communications problems. To be appropriate and effective, a creative idea must be relevant to the target audience.

This is challenging because those who work on the creative side must take all the research, creative briefs, strategy statements, communications objectives, and other input and transform them into an advertising message. Their job is to write copy, design layouts and illustrations, or produce commercials that effectively communicate the central theme on which the campaign is based. Rather than simply stating the features or benefits of a product or service, they must put the advertising message into a form that will engage the audience’s interest and make the ads memorable.

Two perspective of creativity

Two Creative process models

Young's Creative Process

1. Immersion - Getting raw material or data, immersing one's self in the problem to get background.
2. Digestion - Ruminating on the data acquired, turning it this way and that in the mind.
3. Incubation - Ceasing analysis and putting the problem out of conscious mind for a time.
4. Illumination - Often a sudden inspiration or intuitive revelation about a potential solution.
5. Verification - Studying the idea, evaluating it, and developing it for practical usefulness.

Wallas's Creative Process

1. Preparation - Gathering information
2. Incubation - Setting problem aside
3. Illumination - Seeing the solution
4. Verification - Refining the idea

Inputs to the Creative Process

Background Research

The creative specialist should also be knowledgeable about general trends, conditions, and developments in the marketplace, as well as research on specific advertising approaches or techniques that might be effective. To assist in the preparation, incubation, and illumination stages, many agencies provide creative people with both general and product-specific pre-planning input. General pre-planning input can include books, periodicals, trade publications, scholarly journals, pictures, and clipping services, which gather and organize magazine and newspaper articles on the product, the market, and the competition, including the latter’s ads.

Product/Service-Specific Research

                This information generally comes in the form of specific studies conducted on the product or service, the target audience, or a combination of the two. Quantitative and qualitative consumer research such as attitude studies, market structure and positioning studies such as perceptual mapping and lifestyle research, focus group interviews, and demographic and psychographic profiles of users of a particular product, service, or brand are examples of product-specific pre-planning input.

Inputs to creativity

Major selling idea

A. Jerome Jeweler states in his book Creative Strategy in Advertising:

“The major selling idea should emerge as the strongest singular thing you can say about your product or service. This should be the claim with the broadest and most meaningful appeal to your target audience. Once you determine this message, be certain you can live with it; be sure it stands strong enough to remain the central issue in every ad and commercial in the campaign.”

Some of the best approaches used to pinpoint the big idea follow:

1.       Using a Unique selling proposition
2.       Creating Brand image
3.       Finding inherent drama
4.       Positioning

Reading : Advertising and Promotion, Belch & Belch