Brands now need to be consistently creative to thrive. Gone are the days when success came from simply having a recognisable name, or even, a superior product. Creativity has always been important, but since the pandemic and the huge shifts in consumer behaviour, agile brands who are able to think and act creatively and pivot their focus and behaviour are the ones to reap the rewards.
Every organisation now needs to think like a startup in order to understand new technologies and ensure perpetual innovation.
Maintaining brand consistency within this innovation is where the challenge lies. How do you keep a brand consistent when every aspect of the business is constantly changing?
In the past you could create something once, repeat and adapt. But now consumers are constantly seeking the new and exciting. Couple this with ever changing trends in the marketing landscape (focus on short-form video content, AI and analytics, Gen Z attitudes to brands and purpose driven marketing), and it's no wonder you can no longer just put out a great idea and keep running with it, you have to be creative consistently. You have to be bold and shake things up to keep audiences engaged and coming back for more.
At Switch, we believe that experience is everything a brand does to interact with their customers - from its vision and purpose to how it inspires, engages and communicates.
So what are brands to do?
For brands now it’s about empowering and enabling creativity. You need to rip up the rulebook and change how you look at a campaign creatively in order to remain relevant, strong and successful.
It's our belief that creativity should be viewed as a fundamental business tool that’s used to create real & measurable value.
But in order to do that you need to be steadfast in your culture and message.
Key points to consider:
Develop a distinct brand positioning, identity and personality
Test your positioning internally and externally with your customers
Be bold, flexible, and fearless with your content but consistently align it back to your customers (taking in to account aesthetics and who represents your brand)
Focus on creating a brand community that fosters engagement and user generated content. Allowing you to keep up with trends while building brand loyalty
But what actually is creativity?
Creative marketing is all about attracting attention and distinguishing your brand from other competitors. But what does this actually look like in real life?
A couple of examples we really liked were Liquid Death Water’s Taze Test and Burger Kings Ok Google Ad.
Liquid Death have used creativity for their entire brand presence, touting themselves as “a funny water company who hates corporate marketing as much as you do”. They essentially make water more fun and help to kill plastic pollution at the same time. Their brand is essentially, creatively silly.
In late 2022, they launched a very bold campaign on social media showing two “real life haters” who had called Liquid Death the worst tasting water, who they had flown to LA and offered a prize of $1000 if they could accurately identify Liquid Death as the worst tasting water in a blind taste test. Sounds fairly tame so far, but the catch was, if they got the wrong water, they were tasered, with a real taser gun. And they had to apologise for being wrong! The results on this campaign were impressive, with their post about the campaign on LinkedIn generating over 1900 reactions, 157 reposts and 166 comments, while it was also picked up by leading publications including The Drum and AdWeek.
Liquid Death’s creative marketing activities have always been at the far edge, with two albums released on spotify made up entirely of negative social media posts, a taste test that asked people to compare their water with some of the most expensive food items out there, but liquidised (caviar smoothie anyone)?
They stayed true to their brand and produced content which their audience engaged with, while also doing something that other marketing teams hadn’t thought of.
This was also true of Burger King’s ad campaign from 2017 (I know a million years ago now), but we bring this up as a genuinely simple but effective example of creative marketing!
Cast your mind back to a time when smart speakers had just started to proliferate every house. Burger King launched a new ad for its Whopper Burger, but ended up going viral and being banned by Google. How? By including an ‘Okay Google’ command at the end of the ad.
Queue smart speakers across the globe reading off a Wikipedia entry about the Burger King Whopper Burger! The ad caused a large amount of controversy but allowed the brand to gain a huge volume of media coverage and increased brand recognition. Not bad for something so simple!
So how do you leverage creativity in your marketing?
We know that finding that right creative mix can become overwhelming very quickly so why not take our short quiz to find out which creative service you should be leveraging to help you elevate your creative message today.