Why read this? : We explore the 3 key marketing benefits of creative thinking. Learn how to use it to differentiate, drive customer experience and develop brand assets. Read this to learn how to sell the benefits of creative thinking.
You’d think everyone would like creative thinking, right? Big, shiny new ideas that make you go “ooh”. We certainly do. It’s why we love writing about topics like creative culture and idea generation.
As advertising legend Bill Bernbach once said, “Creativity is the last unfair advantage we’re legally allowed to take over our competitors”.
And yet we know from experience, that not everyone’s such a fan of creativity. We’ve all run into idea killers and creative barrier builders, right?
So this article shares a way to take on those who fear creativity, these creative energy vampires. We call it the 3D benefits of creative thinking.
The 3D benefits of creative thinking
We’ve mainly used it with people whose role doesn’t usually need to consider the benefits of creative thinking. For example, with functions like :-
- Finance – to explain why we need that off-site brainstorming session.
- Supply chain – to explain why we need to launch D2C to improve the customer experience.
- Leadership teams – to explain why they should get better at hiring creative people and working with creative agencies.
The model focuses on 3 key benefits of creative thinking. All creatively (!) worded to start with “D” to make them easier to remember :-
- differentiating your brand from competitors in its positioning and brand identity. Creative thinking helps you stand out, so customers know who you are.
- driving the customer experience. Creative thinking puts you in the customer’s shoes so you can find ideas to improve their interactions with your brand.
- developing brand activation assets. Creative thinking lets you develop all the writing, stories, graphic design, photography and video content which bring your brand to life.
Differentiation
The need for differentiation in marketing comes from a psychological bias called the Von Restorff effect. This states we’re more likely to notice something different to everything else around it.
So, if you see A,B,3,D,E, your eye’s immediately drawn to the 3, right? Why’s it not a letter like the others? It stands out because it’s different.
Same as the word different stands out when you put it in bold or italics.
It’s because most of the time our brains work on a kind of autopilot. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winning psychologist famously called this our System 1 brain. (See also our thoughts about thinking article). We don’t give much thought to anything familiar or expected. Ever been driving to work and suddenly realised you can’t remember the last 20 minutes of the journey? That’s your System 1 brain in action because the route’s familiar and expected.
In marketing terms, this autopilot mode benefits market leaders. Shoppers pick up their “usual” brand without much thought, and that’s usually the market leader. Or if new to the category, they pick up the one they’ve heard most about. Again, usually the market leader. Market leaders want customers to think less about what to buy because thoughtless buying defaults to their brand.
However, all the other challenger brands want to disrupt that autopilot. To disrupt the customer’s “usual” habit. They want to make customers think more about which brand to buy. They want to trigger their more active and analytical (System 2) brain, so customers pay more attention to what they’re buying. How they do that starts by applying creative thinking to their positioning.
Benefits of creative thinking in positioning
Positioning is how you want customers to think of you compared to your competitors in the category. It’s a key outcome of the segmentation, targeting and positioning process which helps define your brand.
Your positioning statement defines your target audience and your frame of reference (the category you play in). It also outlines the unique benefit you’ll offer those customers, and the rationale behind it (the reason why and reason to believe).
You build these elements with a mix of :-
- market research so they’re based on facts.
- creative thinking so they’re unique and relevant to your brand’s situation.
The creative thinking helps you differentiate your positioning.
For example, segmentation research gives you different ways to split up the market. Demographic, occasion-based or attitudinal variables. But you’ll need to apply creative thinking to pull those together into a compelling customer segment profile.
The same goes for how customers think about the category and what benefit will mean the most to them. For example, you’ll need creative thinking to show your brand’s the biggest, fastest, coolest or whatever your key benefit is. Those are all just words until you use creative thinking to convert them into something more tangible. Something that you bring to life in your brand identity.
Benefits of creative thinking in brand identity
Your positioning statement defines your point of difference which then underpins your brand identity. It’s how you define how you’ll stand out in the market. By definition, you can’t have a point of difference that’s the same as competitors.
You then use creative thinking to convert this point of difference into brand assets which bring your brand identity to life.
These include tangible assets like your logo, colour palette and tone of voice. Plus, intangible assets like your essence, values and brand personality.
But these brand assets don’t appear out of thin air. You need creative thinking to well, create them. That’s why one of the key benefits of creative thinking is it allows you to come up with a differentiated positioning and differentiated brand assets. You need those for customers to differentiate you from competitors.
Drive the customer experience
Next up in the 3D benefits of creative thinking is its role in driving the customer experience. How do you come up with ideas for what the customer will actually interact with?
Here, its main role is in improving how you do 2 key marketing activities :-
- marketing planning.
- customer journey planning.
Benefits of creative thinking in marketing planning
Your marketing plan converts your brand positioning and brand identity into a set of actions for the next 6-18 months. You define your goals and priorities and set out the key marketing activities you’ll do to win customers and drive sales.
The action part of the plan is driven by your marketing mix. Your product, price, promotion and place plans drive activation. (plus your people, process and physical evidence plans for service businesses). Creative thinking drives how you work out what to do and how, where and when you’ll do it.
For example, you think creatively about what products and services to market in the first place. And to work out what innovation you need to help drive more growth.
You come up with ideas and explore options to work out your optimal pricing strategy and channel (place) strategy. Again, creative thinking.
And of course, lots of creative thinking goes into how you promote your brand. How you persuade customers to choose your brand over the rest. In your advertising. On your website. In your sales promotions.
The ideas you need to do these activities all come from creative thinking. So when the creative idea killers are on the prowl, you can point to activating your marketing plan as one of the key benefits of creative thinking. It’s how you work out how you’re going to meet customer needs.
Benefits of creative thinking in customer journey planning
Part of marketing planning is also putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. Identifying each key interaction they have with your brand.
This customer journey planning maps out the steps customers move through before and after they buy.
The “ideal” journey goes something like this.
They start unaware of your brand. Then they hear about you from an advertising campaign or via your PR activities.
They’re interested enough to learn more about your product (e.g. from your website and social posts). Then, interested enough to try your product. And eventually, they become loyal customers.
However, each of these steps has challenges to overcome. How are they going to hear about your brand? What would make them consider it? How will you persuade them to try your brand? What will make them come back and buy again? And so on.
Market research helps answer those questions. But you need creative thinking to turn those answers into actual actions the customer will experience. Creative thinking drives how you create experiences to meet the customer’s needs at each step of their journey.
For example, you use creative thinking to come up with advertising messages to spark their interest. Creative thinking drives your website content and social posts when they want to find out more. It’s what persuades them to try and keeps them coming back for more, so they tell their friends about you. These positive customer experiences are all benefits which start with creative thinking.
Develop brand assets
The final D in our 3D benefits of creative thinking model is developing specific brand assets. So not just the overall brand identity and the broad actions in your marketing plan, but the specific and detailed elements of your brand that customers interact with.
Creative thinking also has to convert into creative action. To have an impact, it has to make it out of your head, or from a workshop post-it, to an actual tangible “thing” the customer can see, hear, smell, taste or touch.
Creative thinking drives all brand asset development. It covers areas like writing, graphic design, photography and video content. It’s used to improve the novelty, distinctiveness and impact of each brand asset. Which are then used in brand activations like your advertising, website, and sales promotions.
Let’s look at some examples from the brand identity assets we mentioned earlier.
Benefits of creative thinking in bringing tangible assets to life
We’ll start with the role creative thinking plays in the development of tangible assets. Physical items or designs the customer can see, hear, touch, taste or smell.
Logo example
Take the logo design process, for example. Probably the most well-known of brand assets. Every brand has a logo.
Once you identify the need, and write the brief, creating the logo is all about coming up with ideas, and testing them to get to a final clear design.
And how do you come up with those ideas?
With creative thinking, of course.
Brand colours example
The same goes for your brand colour palette.
These colours say something about your brand. You choose them for a reason.
For example, red signifies action. Blue signifies thinking. So, if like our brand, you want to signal lots of thoughtful action, those are the colours you use for your brand.
That’s an example of the creative thinking which goes into brand colours.
Tone of voice example
As per our tone of voice examples article, you also need creative thinking to help choose the right words for your brand to say.
To make it sound right.
For example, there’s a big difference in how a brand sounds if it’s trying to be credible and authoritative versus trying to sound fun and enthusiastic.
Creative thinking underpins the words you choose to bring your brand to life.
Benefits of creative thinking in bringing intangible assets to life
This need for creative thinking to develop brand assets only goes up when the brand assets are intangible. You need creative thinking to convert these abstract concepts into something customers can experience.
Brand essence example
For example, one of the brands we worked with in the past had a brand essence which was similar to “unavoidably audacious”.
It’s a great essence. But it needed creative thinking to come up with ideas on how to bring it to life.
For example, the style of the adverts had to be very disruptive. It used some swear words and didn’t have a polite tone of voice.
To show that it was audacious.
Brand values example
Another example. As per our article on values, Starbucks’s mission is to “create a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome”.
Great. But it doesn’t really mean anything until they use creative thinking to find ways to bring it to life.
For example, their inclusion and diversity programs. Their work to reduce their environmental impact and improve ethical product sourcing. And the work their stores do to support their local communities.
Brand personality example
A final example. Brands should try to figure out how their brand personality will fit the Big 5 personality traits (sometimes called the OCEAN traits).
Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
One of the best examples is Google, who are strongly open to new experiences. You see that in how much innovation they do. But also in their 20% rule, where engineers got to spend 20% of their time working on their own projects. Using their creative thinking.
But to have had that idea about creative thinking, they’d have had to have used some creative thinking about it in the first place. As with that creative thought, and as this feels like it might be getting a bit meta (confusing when talking about Google), we’ll stop there.
Conclusion - The 3D benefits of creative thinking for marketing
Great creative thinking has a real “ooh” factor. It’s what fuels the ideas that move your business forward. Great ideas make work not feel like work. However, it’s clearly not an easy skill for everyone. It sometimes feels too flippant and playful in the serious world of business, right? But without it, nothing good happens. So, you need some way to convince all the idea killers out there that creativity is the lifeblood of business growth.
Our 3D benefits of creative thinking model helps you show how creative thinking differentiates your brand to stand out with customers. How it drives the customer experience in your marketing and customer journey plans. And how it helps you develop the brand assets customers interact with.
In short, creative thinking is how you get from those everyday, mundane “oh” ideas to breakthrough, magical “ooh” ideas which will drive your brand’s future growth.
Check out our creative thinking guide and our how to create a creative culture article for more on this. Or get in touch if you’d like to learn more about the benefits of creative thinking.
Photo credit
Red tulip / Yellow tulip : Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash
Woman at Station with Phone : Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash
Person holding light bulb : Photo by Fachy Marín on Unsplash
Person holding compass : Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
Graphic designer using Adobe : Photo from Pixabay
Girl reading book : Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash
Schumacher outfit : Photo by ZU photography on Unsplash
Starbucks : Photo by Khadeeja Yasser on Unsplash
Google M&Ms : Photo by lalo Hernandez on Unsplash
