In today’s crowded and competitive marketplace, it’s hard for a company’s marketing and advertising activity to stand out and capture attention. Even harder to leave a lasting impression, change behaviour or increase sales.
We believe organisations need three things to succeed: a strong and compelling brand, maximum reach within their target audience and a frictionless experience when it comes time to buy.
Earlier this year, I explored how to build a compelling brand, but before we look at how to get your brand in front of the broadest audience, there’s one more element of the brand piece it’s essential to get right: the creative platform.
The creative platform comes after you’ve nailed the strategic brand positioning, building on the brand identity and distinctive assets like your logo, colours, fonts, image style, brand characters, etc. When done right, it serves as a guiding light for a brand’s creative expression and ensures its effectiveness across all customer touchpoints.
The importance of a creative platform
A well-crafted creative platform is more than just a catchy slogan. It’s the strategic foundation that provides inspiration and direction for a brand’s creative endeavours. It encapsulates the brand’s essence, values and unique offering, distilling them into a compelling narrative that resonates with the target audience.
By establishing a creative platform, companies can ensure their marketing and advertising campaigns are cohesive, consistent and aligned with their overall brand identity. This consistency is crucial in building brand recognition and fostering a strong emotional connection with customers.
The golden thread of creativity
Imagine a tapestry woven with intricate threads of many different colours, each one representing a different aspect of the brand as it presents itself to the marketplace. A creative platform acts as the golden thread that ties these individual elements together, creating a harmonious and cohesive whole.
This golden thread of creativity should run through all marketing and advertising campaigns, ensuring a seamless and consistent experience for consumers across various touchpoints. Whether it’s a television commercial, a social media post or an in-store display, the brand’s creative expression should be instantly recognisable and aligned with its overarching platform.
Consistency and coherence across customer touchpoints
In today’s omnichannel world, consumers interact with brands through a multitude of channels, both online and offline. Ensuring consistency and coherence across these touchpoints is incredibly important for building familiarity, which is the precursor to brand trust and loyalty.
That’s what a strong creative platform can do. It serves as a unifying force across all customer touchpoints – from the website design to the product packaging, from sales collateral to digital advertising. Every interaction should reinforce the brand’s core values and messaging, creating a seamless and cohesive experience for the customer.
Rooted in strategic positioning and deep understanding
Effective creative platforms do not emerge from flights of fancy or baseless assumptions. They’re the result of a deep understanding of the brand’s strategic positioning, target audience and competitive landscape.
By thoroughly analysing the brand’s identity, values and unique offering, as well as the preferences and behaviours of the target audience, companies can develop a platform that resonates on a deeper level.
Additionally, studying the competitive landscape allows brands to identify opportunities for differentiation and carve out a unique space in the market. You want to understand the category norms and unspoken rules so you know how to break them in clever and authentic ways.
Combining strategy and creative imagination
While a creative platform is grounded in strategic insights, it also requires a creative and imaginative leap of faith. It is the blending of strategic thinking and creative expression that gives rise to truly impactful and memorable campaigns.
This fusion allows brands to go beyond product features and benefits, tapping into the emotional and aspirational desires of their target audience as well as relevant cultural or category moments. By combining strategic insights with creative imagination, brands can craft narratives that resonate on a deeper level, fostering emotional connections and driving brand loyalty.
An enduring insight and flexible idea
Andrew Geoghegan, the Global Consumer Planning Director at Diageo PLC, wrote in WARC’s The Effectiveness Code that the ultimate goal of creative effectiveness is to provide ‘an enduring insight and a flexible idea that can be executed across multiple marketing channels’. I love that idea. The creative platform should be timeless and adaptable, allowing brands to evolve and stay relevant in an ever-changing market.
By crafting a platform that captures the essence of the brand while remaining flexible enough to accommodate new trends and technologies – as well as new initiatives and campaigns – companies can ensure the longevity and effectiveness of their creative expression. This adaptability enables brands to seamlessly integrate new marketing channels and tactics while maintaining a consistent and recognisable brand identity.
An example: CovertSwarm
CovertSwarm offers constant, unlimited scope, multi-discipline cyber attacks via subscription – a truly unique proposition to the market. They came to us with a challenge: How do we stand out in a crowded, competitive marketplace, and still get our stakeholders to listen to us?
We did deep research into the company, category and customers to better understand the landscape and the unique value the brand offered. We refined the target segments and identified clear motivations and intent for each group. We also created several layers of messaging to answer their specific needs.
Our creative platform—You Deserve to Be Hacked—truly stands out from the competition and was rolled out across the website, PR, SEO, Paid Media, and Creative. The impact has been huge. In fact, Clutch recently recognised them as one of the Top 100 fastest-growing companies—second in the UK and first in the global cybersecurity space.
This is what happens when you get the creative platform right.
The importance of creative commitment
I mentioned WARC’s recent whitepaper, The Effectiveness Code above, which was written by James Hurman and Peter Field. It’s a brilliant study on what makes creative campaigns effective in both building brands and delivering commercial impact.
They identified six types of effects that creative marketing produces and put them into a hierarchical ladder from least to most commercially impactful as a framework for marketers to evaluate their work and improve. These six rungs of the ladder are:
- An influence idea that over-achieves on campaign metrics, leading to a bump in fame and word-of-mouth within three months
- The behaviour breakthrough campaign that can change consumer behaviour in the short term (around three months)
- A sales spike campaign that creates short-term, temporary sales growth within three months
- The brand builder campaign that improves brand health over six months or more
- The commercial triumph that creates sustained sales success lasting between 6-18 months
- The enduring icons that create long-term brand and sales growth, measured over three years or more
In addition to this framework, they found three variables that influence the effectiveness of a campaign: media spend, campaign duration and the number of channels used in the campaign. They’ve labelled these variables ‘creative commitment’ and found a tight correlation between creative commitment and effectiveness.
So once you have a creative platform that can run through your campaigns, it’s important to work with the levers of spend, duration and media mix to work to your advantage. James and Peter found that ‘campaigns with longer durations and more media channels are more effective’ even at low budgets.
In conclusion, ensuring the creative effectiveness of your brand hinges on the development and implementation of a well-crafted creative platform. This platform serves as a guiding light, providing inspiration and direction for a brand’s creative expression while ensuring consistency and coherence across all customer touchpoints.
By combining strategic foundational choices with creative imagination, brands can craft narratives that resonate with their target audience, fostering emotional connections and driving brand loyalty. Ultimately, a strong creative platform is an invaluable asset, enabling brands to stand out in a crowded marketplace and leave a lasting impression on consumers.
Turn your brand into a talking point
We’d love to speak with you about the best way to bring your brand to life in the marketplace. Get in touch today.
