By Meenakshi Aggarwal-Gupta
Organisations come up with marketing campaigns to promote their product or service and then use all possible tools in their arsenal to ensure the success of these campaigns. A ‘clutter breaking’, ‘impactful’, ‘memorable’ ‘insightful’ campaign often relies on the strength of its core idea and the finesse in the execution. With thousands of campaigns being presented daily to customers, coming up with a unique idea can become a challenge for most advertisers. The fact that such few campaigns are memorable makes us wonder whether there is a lack of original ideas or if the execution is poor.
Is the marketing industry struggling to keep up with originality and creativity?
An innovative idea is worth the effort since it provides the groundwork for a more focused and effective campaign. The marketing industry may face challenges in creating unique campaigns for hundreds and thousands of clients. Brands attempt to build awareness and thought leadership through topical campaigns by capturing customers’ emotions, but the same idea may be shared by multiple brands. Witness the social media posts shared by most companies during festivals and momentous occasions. With everyone trying to make their presence felt, it is far easier to be lost in the noise than to make a mark. How many of your posts have gone viral? How many of them have you received as a forward on WhatsApp?
Although ideas cannot be copyrighted, their material form might be. Marketers constantly need to reboot to maintain the essence and originality of their ideas and the execution of these ideas. Here are some guidelines to do that.
Unlearn the old concepts and innovate new campaign ideas
1. Be aware of your world – Brands constantly take marketing initiatives, many of them challenging existing mindsets and stereotypes. Various economic, social and political events occur throughout the world, many of them having a long lasting impact on how humans behave. The more you keep yourself abreast of these breakthroughs, either through social media or through news, the more contemporary ideas you’ll be able to incorporate into your campaigns. If you learn about a prominent brand’s guerrilla marketing campaign, you may apply the same boldness to a domain you’re acquainted with.
2. Take inspiration from others’ work – Seeking inspiration does not mean you copy the work of others. Take inspiration from the campaign’s central idea and build your thoughts around it. Coincidences are unavoidable, and although brains function differently, the same thought can sometimes strike two separate minds. The differentiator then will be the execution of that idea. You and your competitors are unlikely to come up with the same execution plans for the same astounding ideas that established a brand’s pull. They may however have similar objectives, offerings, and customers, giving you a better understanding of the campaign’s efficacy. You can gain insights into how people react to your competitor’s campaign, and whether it will work in your favour, and then use that as inspiration for your ideation and creativity.
3. Identify what your target audience wants – To be a creative and effective marketer, you must first understand your audience. Knowing your audience may require primary or secondary research. You can employ various methods such as interviews to create a consumer persona, survey research, FGD’s, an immersive experience and many more. You will have a deeper understanding of reality if you gather different viewpoints. This would stimulate your creativity and make your ideas more relevant.
Where research is not possible, listen to your instincts. You may not quite fit into your target demographics, but if something in the natural surroundings intuitively interests you, it will most likely interest someone too.
4. No idea is good or bad – Not all terrible-sounding ideas are bad. Many great ideas were once thought to be insane. We naturally generate many ideas and discard all except a few that meet our high expectations. The saying goes, “You cannot edit a blank page.” First, write, and then improvise on it. Marketers should keep those crazy-sounding ideas around for a bit longer to see if they can tweak and transform them into something more intriguing. Chew on the idea, sleep on it, discuss it before you discard it. The bonus tip is not to be afraid to take a risk on a promising idea.
5. Take Risks – Risk-taking may be essential throughout the campaign planning and execution phase. Include more individuals in the brainstorming process. The more brains at work, the more distinct insights you will acquire, be it in research and design or strategy and execution. The digital world is getting highly congested, especially on topical days and events like Mother’s Day, environment day etc. when many brands tailor their messaging to suit the same occasion. Don’t be afraid to attempt something new and unique in such a situation. It might be a key differentiator for your brand, perhaps increasing visibility and leads. However, take risks for something your brand is willing to stand up for. Nike has always stood up for equality. Its campaign ‘Believe in Something’ could have gone wrong but it actually led to an increase in sales and stock price, and also got them free advertising. Closer home, Tata Tanishq has always taken a stand on various social issues. It has had to recall some of these ads because of the public response but this risk-taking approach has also ensured that its ads are memorable and distinct from the ads of any other jewellery brand.
In a nutshell
Creativity is just connecting things – Steve Jobs
Consider thousands of creative people racking their brains to create one-of-a-kind campaigns. Not to mention occasion-based marketing, such as Environment Day or New Year’s Eve campaigns, which come with the challenge of having an impact and not having ideas clash with anyone else’s.
The only way to be distinct is to create a pool of raw material – consumer insights, multiple perspectives, sectoral knowledge, technological understanding and more. Take time to go through this material, digest it, mentally process it and let the connections emerge. These connections may come through your individual eureka moments or may be a function of brainstorming and iterative thinking. The connections will coalesce into a central idea that will help create and drive a campaign that will be different from anyone else’s.
And always, observe human behaviour and experiment with new approaches to never run out of ideas.
The author is co-founder and COO, 4AM Worldwide