Creative strategy support
We want to help you deliver strategies that are more creatively rounded. And use creative to get your initiatives off the ground. Having your own creative director in your pocket adding an alternative view point helps. Or to make sure agencies are hitting the brief and not bamboozling you with agency-speak. Injecting some creative thinking earlier on could pay dividends. What we do we can run as workshops, facilitated brainstorms or part of a bigger project.
Strategic support project with Canada Life read full case study here
Data insights
We refer to this as cold data. These are the hard facts. And we’ll dig as deep as we need to with the data experts in your team or the data experts in ours.
· Customer data, initial profiles and personas
· Industry data, trends and predictions
· Brand data, reach and perceptions
· Competitor data, positioning, SWOT
· Organisational data, structure, processes resource
· Audits SEO, tech and creative
Behavioural insights
This is the warm data. How people actually behave. We’ll get a much better idea of the audience, needs, fears and perceptions. Using instinct and intuition to think more creatively.
· Web analytics and behavioural information
· What’s worked, what hasn’t
· Lifecycles, needs and objections
· Creative hypothesis
· Messaging and propositions
Creative insights
This is where the real insight comes whenever there’s an opportunity to do it. While we are interviewing we are checking ideas, concepts, turns of phrase and validating hunches. And of course, we’re listening, because people say more in conversation than they do ticking boxes.
· One to one interview with staff
· One to one interview with customers
· Groups and workshops
· Proposition and message testing
What we do
Creative strategy
Yes we love the data. We adore the facts and crave the insights – this is the marketing intelligence and you’ll be all over this anyway. But as creatives the difference is we also apply our instincts, our intuition and a healthy dose of customer reality – this is the creative intelligence that we bring, and will lead to a much more empathetic strategy, and a more inspiring creative brief.
Content strategy and content plan
Super granular. Different people respond to different things. Some prefer to read, others to be presented to in film. And as you’ll know, different channels have different rules – it’s not one size fits all. And as we are integrated creative thinkers, this means everything, from web to email to mail to TikTok, all speaking to the same end point.
Personas
Who are your audience? To be correct, who are your audiences? Too much reliance on the data can lose sight of the real person reading your ad. We help colour-in the data points, which makes building things for people simpler, and customer centricity real.
Propositions
There’s a simple formula, and it’s all about the customer. Get it right and your output will be simple, single minded and engaging.
Messaging
There’s a hierarchy and stories need to be told in the correct order. It’s about grabbing attention, selling and reassuring to build desire, and then building confidence to effect an action. And it’s not just the order, it’s the cadence at which you tell your story that matters.
Tone of voice
How do we sound? What’s our personality? People respond to people, how do we make your corporation sound like we’re all on the same wavelength?
Brand design guidelines
Asset reviews and recommendations. Reviewing the visual style and evolving it. It’s a balance, consistency and recognition, without standing still and without screwing it all up.
Design thinking
We all know what design thinking is. Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test (there are other expressions of it). What’s remarkable is that natural design thinkers don’t always get asked into the room. Design thinking is how creative people have thought for time immemorial.
Proof of concept
Articulation of an idea to get C-suite buy-in. Visualisation of concepts. Delivery of MVP creative for testing. This works best when the creative brain and the strategic brain are working side by side on it.
RFI/RFPs
Make them stand out. Not just prettying up your document, this is showing prospective partners how the two brands might work together. How you’d speak to their customers, or they’d speak to yours. Make them see you’re taking the opportunity seriously.
Working with agencies
It’s not about keeping them on their toes, it’s about making sure you are working with them efficiently. Everything from your client brief to checking the agency creative brief they send back, feeding back on creative concepts and being the brand guardian.
Discover
Understand the situation, and the problem we need to solve. Focus on the customer. Insights. Their needs, wants, behaviours and objections. Competitors and the market.
Design
The story we need to tell. Strategies planned, propositions, messaging and customer journeys mapped out. Concepts and wireframes and creative direction agreed.
Deliver
The deliverables. Everything made, signed, sealed and delivered. Designs completed and all copy written. Images created, pixel perfect artwork, all strategies completed. And sent live and hand-overs done.
Develop
Evolving the product. We’ll have agreed a testing strategy, but what comes next? We’ll review results and agree changes. Reset our KPIs and design and deliver the next stage
