8.02 – Defining Your Creative Strategy
Creating a standout advertising and content marketing strategy is essential when competing for your audience’s attention. Whether through compelling imagery, clever copy, psychological appeal, or an intriguing call to action, having a clear strategy helps your ads shine amidst the competition.
Building Relationships Through Creative
Think of your creative as a means to build relationships between your brand and your prospects. This connection forms around shared values, interests, and personas, ultimately leading to sales. Your creative should fuel this relationship by establishing a strong brand identity, highlighting your unique features, and showcasing commonalities with your core customer segments.
To start developing your creative strategy, identify your best sources of creative ideas. Consider input from employees, customers, fashion trends, and social media. Assess each idea’s feasibility regarding budget, resources, positioning, and uniqueness. Create a table similar to the one in Figure 8-1 to list your sources and constraints.
Building Your Creative Elements
All aspects of your brand’s creative need to reflect the values, personalities, attitudes, and interests of your core audience. Each element should speak to your customers’ hearts and minds to capture their attention and encourage engagement – two vital aspects of marketing success.
Your creative strategy should align with your marketing strategy and plan. For example, if your target market is millennial males, you might focus on creative elements that appeal to their values:
- Happiness Drivers: Freedom, self-expression, adventure, innovation, and justice.
- Values: Minimalism, friendships, technology, experiences, excitement, and authenticity.
- Entertainment: Fast-paced action, dynamism, bold colours, and video blogs.
Colouring Your Creative Psychologically
Colour significantly influences moods, productivity, and even appetite. Here are a few insights into how colour can impact engagement, response, and ROI:
- Colour and Judgement: Research shows that within 90 seconds, most people make an unconscious judgement about something’s value and trustworthiness, with 60 to 90 percent of that judgement based on colour.
- Calming Blue: Blue can calm people, making them stay longer and potentially order more.
- Stimulating Red: Red increases heart rate, respiratory rates, and appetite, making it suitable for fast-food establishments but perhaps not for restaurants wanting customers to linger.
Impacting Moods and Perceptions
Colour influences attitudes towards brands and shopping behaviour. For example, research by professors Rajesh Bagchi and Amar Cheema found that the likelihood of a purchase is higher in predominantly blue settings compared to red ones. This suggests that blue environments encourage relaxation and lingering, while red environments may cause distraction or anxiety.
Every colour triggers different mood or value judgements. Here are some associations:
- Blue: Trust, intelligence, respect, purification, honour, security, and faith.
- Purple: Wisdom, maturity, dignity, virtue, and long life.
- Red: Energy, courage, glory, inner strength, and passion.
- Orange: Energy, joy, creativity, excitement, and enthusiasm.
- Yellow: Enlightenment, awareness, consciousness, optimism, and warmth.
- Green: Healing, awakening, learning, independence, and change.
Setting Your Brand’s Colour Tone
Choose colours that reflect the image you want to project to your targeted customers. For instance, blue is a solid choice for financial services because it communicates trust, intelligence, and honour.
Consumers’ Perceptions of Colours and Value
Backing up the colour wheel meanings derived by psychologists is some research by Faber Birren, a pioneer in colour research and author of Color Psychology and Color Therapy. He conducted a survey asking people to assign colours to a list of words. Here’s a summary of his findings:
- Trust: Blue
- Security: Blue
- Speed: Red
- Cheapness: Orange, with yellow a close second
- High Quality: Black
- High Tech: Black followed by blue and grey
- Reliability: Blue
- Courage: Purple and red
- Fear/Terror: Red
- Fun: Orange, with yellow a close second
Understanding how colours influence perceptions of value and brand attributes is crucial. Aligning your brand’s colours with desired attributes ensures your colour palette supports your mission and appeals to your target customers. Choose your colours carefully, as they represent your brand’s values, lifestyle, and interests.
Using Brand Iconology
Iconology involves the colours, symbols, and persona that define your brand. Your choices should reflect the persona, lifestyle, and attitudes of your core customers. Leading brands spend significant effort finding specific hues that align with their customers’ energy.
Brands often select a primary colour and complementary secondary colours, along with specific grey and black tones. Fonts are also crucial and should be consistent across all signage, imagery, ads, promotions, and channels.
Writing Words That Work
Effective marketing copy uses words to create feelings that move people to act. The best way to capture attention and inspire engagement is to ask leading questions that your brand can answer or resolve, or make statements that present direct value.
The Power of “Free”
Research shows that using the phrase “but you are free to accept or refuse” can significantly increase compliance and response rates. This approach empowers consumers to make their own informed choices and minimises sales pressure, building trust and often leading to engagement, sales, and loyalty.
Bottom Line
Your creative strategy should appeal to the intellect, self-confidence, aspirations, and personas of your target customers. By following these guidelines, you can master the right message and emotional appeal, boosting your ability to grow your business.
