Be creative, they say. Think bluesky, they say. Encourage innovation, they say.
We all know what a business says and what it does aren’t always the same thing. The problem with business is it exists to make money. And the problem with creativity, is you can’t measure its ability to make money, only the cost of it.
So there you have it. Business and creativity exist, but never the twain shall meet.
Except it does. Start-ups do it. Agencies do it. Challenger brands do it. Disruptors do it. So why can’t established, big business do it?
Largely because big business is run by people who have always done it this way. And it’s worked. They’re still profitable, so if it ain’t broke, there’s nothing to fix. Except that your old, tired brand has become business magnolia and no one sees it anymore. All you need is that young whippersnapper to come along and grab the attention of your drone customer base and BAM, you’ve lost your market share.
Take for example Vodafone. It was the first to market with mobile communications and sent the first ever text message in 1984. It then grew into a global giant; sponsoring festivals, sports teams and even had David Beckham promoting WAP in their ads. Now, a mega-merger and a new challenger brand has set the cat among the pigeons. Vodafone is now limping behind in last place, and suddenly no one cares about its legacy or that it was once standing strong on the gold podium.
Vodafone isn’t alone in its struggle. There are plenty of leading brands who are slowly, but surely being left behind. However, if you find yourself in said company, there are a few things you can do to turn it from a stale brand to a creative brand.
1. Get the right leadership
I know, this isn’t the role of a lowly copywriter or creative, no matter how senior, to choose an illustrious leader. But it is within your gift to influence them.
Pick something that is important to the business, but not their bread and butter – they’re least likely to take risks if it could affect revenue. Present your ideas by answering the problem then addressing the hows and the whats.
Show costs, timescales and process. Think about measurement (see, bottom of this blog post). And have strategy and governance around it.
2. Challenge everything
No one wants to be that annoying person who sits in meetings questioning everything. And no one likes that person who is negative and always says no. That’s not what you’re going to do.
Throughout my entire career, I’ve had battles with legal/regulatory/compliance. All of them vetoing customer-friendly language in favour of a more archaic, Rumpole of The Bailey (ask your parents) tone. No one ever argues with someone who spent nearly a decade learning how to argue. But it’s wrong to blindly accept what they say as the… well, law.
When they feed back, I ask them to back up what they’re saying with rationale – much like they do in court. You quickly find that a lot of what they’re saying is purely subjective or, if they offer a legal reason, you come back with an agreed alternative. Understanding their feedback means you can tick that box, without stifling creativity.
It’s the same with marketing, brand or communications teams. Often they get hung up on one particular thing or offer a subjective opinion. Same principle, as long as it’s consistent with what’s going out in other channels and doesn’t jar with their objectives, they tend to open to pushing the boundaries.
3. Look at the bigger picture
Big companies work in siloes and often there is no clear owner. However, being a bit bullish and proactive, you can pull all these things together. Get marketing, brand, social media, digital, etc. in room and thrash out the end-to-end customer journey. I don’t mean from the point they interact with your comms or brand, I mean look at their pain points or levels of awareness or how they behave. What will they want to do at point X, then what will they expect to happen, how do they feel when they interact with your brand and what do they do after.
By understanding this, mapping it out, and presenting it to whoever is responsible for ultimately signing off the concept, you’ve created a story with really emotional and relatable outputs. Everyone loves a story, so take the decision maker through yours (your customer’s).
4. Encourage a bit of creative competitiveness
I get my team to look around them, at billboards, what they get through the post and what lands in their inbox. What’s good about it? Did it grab your attention with a snappy, emoji-ladened subject line, was it the sexy die-cut, spot varnish job, how about the clear messaging and journey? Getting people to look around them subtly encourages them to do better and think bigger.
Having an inspiration wall in the office or sharing links to articles or clever ads will get those juices flowing. Have regular creative reviews where you retrospectively look at a campaign or a page, with all the analytics that go with it to grease those creative wheels. And have creative hackathons, taking people out of their day-to-day grind and getting them to solve a problem can inject a new energy.
5. Last, but not least, KPIs
Business loves numbers. If business was a person, they’d be constantly wanting alone time to watch seven eat nine (present continuous tense loves to ruin my jokes). The best way of getting business on-board with your creative idea is to start small (cheap), have clear, measurable objectives that benefit the business and report back your findings.
This will act as a good starting block to getting business to invest in the big, sexy, creative ideas.
As I said at the beginning, creativity is a hard one to measure. But this is when real user testing and AB testing comes into its own. Then there are the standard measures like shares, likes, followers, bounce rates, traffic, conversion, etc. but make sure not to muddy the waters with anything else – make it purely about the creative.
Getting an organisation to shift its thinking and culture is no mean feat, but these small, incremental changes can shift buy-in for whatever it is you’re selling. You’re not going to go from meh to strutting giraffe-amingo overnight, so with a little time, patience and above all, numbers, you can get there.
