The 3 Pillars of Creative Strategy
1. Making Audiences Care
Are you a business, or media producer?
Then you know that if no one cares about what you have to offer, you fail.
But how do you make someone bothered by what you’re offering?
What most people don’t know is that audience perception is only 20% conscious. Everything we usually say to each other is just data meant to cause some type of understanding. We are trying to make each other “get it”.
Try to remember the painful boredom of this type of communication during the most boring lessons at school.
If you do that in business, what do you think will happen? Not much. Yet, most businesses do just that. They say: I sell pineapples. But nobody cares. Because it doesn’t concern them.
And unlike in school, people have the right to walk away. So what are you going to do?
You need to communicate smarter. Not with your mouth. But with everything you’ve got.
How can you communicate better?
Now remember that one exceptional teacher who managed to captivate and hold your attention. They managed to get you to care. Most likely it wasn’t even the most interesting subject, making it even more enigmatic.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that as a business?
No it wouldn’t be nice. It would be sales doubling epic.
How much your audience cares comes from the 80% of communication that is perceived subconsciously.
It’s less about what is said, and more about how it’s said (or shown).
The simple fact is, you must make your audience care, or you will fail.
2. Strategy & Systems
These things don’t happen by chance. If you think some hugely successful brand got there by luck, you need to keep reading.
The most successful people and brands systematically take action based on strategy.
I want to point you in the right direction so I’ll tell you this: You need to communicate on 5 levels.
Logical - What they understand about you.
Emotional - How they feel about you.
Identification - How much they can relate to you.
Discovery - How they discover and get to know you.
Awareness Depth - How much of your message is captivated by your audience.
You can try to get by on one or two of these but it won’t be as effective as it could be. Believe me I’ve tried.
There are strategies and systems we can use for each of these categories so that we can take consistent action that moves the needle.
Okay let’s go right?
For most purposes this is enough.
However, if you want to take things to a level where your work will linger in the minds of your audience you can go deeper.
3. Abstraction
I use abstraction in my work to create coherent depth in projects.
At the upper levels of abstraction, a representation is simplified and broad.
At the bottom level of abstraction, a representation is more granulated, capturing specific intricacies. This is the level most audiences perceive at face value.
It’s possible to orchestrate all levels of the abstraction hierarchy. Great designers do this. We should also do it in marketing and communication. It’s genius.
It allows the creation of flawlessly coherent experiences that feel extremely seductive.
Full spectrum, layered and coherent creative strategy causes a lingering impression on your audience. It’s in fact so smart, it feels just plain evident to them.
The bottom line is, you can’t really serve your audience if you don’t think like your audience. It will always be all about the customer.