A wise man once said: “Creativity is the last unfair advantage we’re legally allowed to take over our competitors.”
As usual, Bill Bernbach was spot on. However, creativity that is deemed worthy of greatness and creativity that delivers seismic commercial results are not necessarily the same thing.
With an incalculable number of brands in existence today – across more than 2,000 product categories – producing creative work that’s memorable and impactful is more challenging now than ever before. This raises an important question: are creative practitioners or even the top graphic designers truly set up to create unforgettable, commercially impactful work?
Create empathy not apathy
Havas (the huge global comms group) reports that if 75% of all the world’s brands disappeared today, people wouldn’t care. If that’s not concerning enough for brand owners, Harvard Business School’s Professor Emeritus, Gerald Zaltman, claims that roughly 95% of our purchase decisions are controlled by our subconscious mind.
As a result, we creative practitioners have an ethical responsibility to our clients that goes beyond simply creating work that stands out from their competitors. Given that only five percent of purchase decisions are made consciously, we must skilfully and deliberately create reasons to care, along with meaningful and unforgettable brand design. This is why we’ve always focused on placing human beings at the centre of brand design at Taxi Studio.
We achieve this through a tool that improves the chances of creating unforgettable brand design by focusing on memory structures and sharpening briefs to within a micron of their lives – ultimately inspiring unforgettable creative thinking. It’s brutally (and beautifully) simple, because we humans are hard-wired to respond better to simplicity.
Create unforgettable not unacceptable
The typical starting point for developing new ideas is often to ‘stand out’ by ‘being different’. Blue-sky-thinking-in white-spaces-that-break-conventions-outside-the-box, sort of stuff.
For Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay – the first people to reach the top of the world – this made sense because there was a clear point to navigate toward. And it was new. A breakthrough, in fact. But blindly adopting a disruption-based strategy for brands is a waste of time and money, because when everyone disrupts, nothing is truly disruptive.
Instead, our metaphorical mountain to climb is this: harnessing the power of design to forge lasting memories that are easily recalled by the subconscious (AKA, create unforgettable).
The brain drain
IBM’s original mainframe stored 2.5 million gigabytes of data – the same as our brains – but unlike the mainframe, according to Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve, roughly 70% of the information we absorb is lost within 24 hours, rising to approximately 90% over the course of just one week
For brands, this means three things:
- Human brain capacity isn’t an issue
- Mediocrity is very quickly forgotten
- Distinctiveness and emotive appeal increase memory recall
People are always searching for better things – and brands have a role to play in that – but to be new and persuasive, they must also be distinctive and create lasting, emotional impressions.
Distinctiveness (Stand Out) + Emotional Appeal = Sought Out.
When this – the Holy Grail for brands – is achieved, they transition from merely ‘standing out’ to being actively ‘sought out’.
Our driving belief
Brands that fail to make a mark on the memory are headed for obscurity. We know this to be true because:
- If 75% of all brands disappeared today, no one would care
- We forget 90% of the information we receive within a week
- 95% of all our purchase decisions are made subconsciously
Consequently:
- Brands must be more concerned with RTCs* than RTBs
- Recall is the key. Our brains store 2.5m GB: storage isn’t the issue
- Our past experiences influence our purchasing behaviour
*Reasons to Care.
The brief paradox
It’s funny, if not confounding, that so little time and thought are invested in creating briefs, especially considering that 90% of marketers believe the most valuable – yet most neglected – tool is the creative brief. To make matters worse, roughly 33% of marketing spend is wasted due to misdirected briefs.
Roughly 33% of marketing spend is wasted due to misdirected briefs
We receive many briefs (thankfully), but oftentimes what we get are what I’ve come to term ‘not-briefs’. These are mountainous documents that, while detailed, miss the mark of a true brief. A brief should be concise, compelling and charged with creative possibility.
While some client briefs are very well-written, engaging, and brilliantly describe the problem to solve, the real issue may still be missed. If a brief is just one degree off at the start, we’ll end up a hundred miles away from where we need to be. As a result, we’ve created a brutally simple briefing tool to support our clients – where needed – in ensuring that the project’s foundation is set up for commercial success.
Lasting words of wisdom
Creative work must be developed for real-world consumption, where simply being different is no longer enough. To be truly unforgettable, we need to build salient solutions that make the remaining 5% of our conscious purchasing decisions work much harder, with the goal of getting our subconscious 95% to pay closer attention.
Building on William’s wise words: Creativity is the last unfair advantage we’re legally allowed to take over our competitors – provided that creativity is designed to elicit powerful, positive memories that ultimately drive significant commercial success.
Capturing hearts and minds has never been harder. For brands to stand a chance of being considered – let alone remembered – they must reject unremarkable thinking and create unforgettable work.
It’s as easy (and as difficult) as that.
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