Creative Branding Ideas Imagination Is Everything To Make You Stand Out

The next step of HiveMind's creative branding process involves creative. It's time to turn all the brand positioning, keyword insights, analytics, and interviews into creative branding ideas that can serve as the background for a fresh brand experience. So first, let's talk about why Big Creative Ideas are so important. Realize that creative branding strategy brainstorming is where the magic happens, where people get nervous as well as excited, where left-brain people try to squash ideas before they can grow into something beautiful, edgy, or startling. 

Faith in Creative Branding Ideas

Left-brained marketing consultants warn not to put too much faith in creative ideas. Just state your product's benefits clearly, they advise. Make sure you have your keywords identified. Keep messages plain and simple. Google's robots don't understand creative ideas. Test one (mediocre) idea against another for success. Well I'm here to tell you that you shouldn't believe them. 

Marry Creative Ideas With Strong Positioning

We all know that the real marketing battles take place in your prospects' minds. The key to reaching your audience, before your competitors, isyou guessed itcreativity. The creative branding ideas you develop have to not only capture and maintain a presence in your audience's mind, but also present a compelling message, a memorable, consistent personality, voice and point of view - all creative issues. 

The World Is Flat

I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but no matter what you do strategically, you still have to compete with a zillion other messages. And you have only two choices: You can repeat messages over and over and over again until they finally sink in. Or you can say them in such a fresh, new, surprising and relevant way that people can't forget them. The latter approach is more effective and costs less. 

Frequency Is Maddeningly Slow

Without creative impact, your message is relegated to the slow seep of frequency. Time is spent waiting for your search rankings to improve, and for the number of your twitter followers to grow. You wait patiently for nature to take its course and for your selling points to eventually seep in. If they seep in at all. Nowadays, it simply takes too long. In the meantime, a competitor can zip past you into your audience's head with a new idea or benefit. Or even take a position or attribute or key differentiator away from you. All they need is the right strategy and the powerful engine of creative impact.

Creativity Delivers Impact

Rather than sending out interruptive, self-centered messages that tell people what they should believe about your products, send them something impactful. Impact is a direct result of how original, surprising and relevant your creative is. Despite the tremendous media clutter out there, people will always stop, notice and connect with a message that's fresh and direct and engaging and human. Always. 

It's Not For The Timid

Creating bold ideas like this means running risks. If an email campaign, microsite, or product promotion is provocative, interesting and intriguing, it will create an adverse comment or two along the way - especially inside your company. That's when you know you've got something. In fact, if the idea doesn't make some company executive sweat a little, than you're probably not saying anything worth saying. 

The Process

Now that you understand the importance of creativity, let's talk about the process for coming up with great creative branding ideas. Some people imagine that a creative genius sits in a room and brainstorms concepts, until he/she gets what they want. Other times, we imagine someone sitting down and solving a problem with a flash of inspiration. Some actors use the Stanislav technique for immersing themselves in their roles. This has been successfully adapted to coming up with marketing and advertising ideas.

The point is that great ideas have been fashioned in all sorts of ways. There's no right or wrong way to do it. But in our experience it is difficult to consistently generate great ideas using a random wait for my muse 
But in our experience, it is difficult to consistently generate great ideas using a random, wait-for-my-muse, methodology. More likely is the scenario where many people get together and brainstorm. This is a still an unfettered, no-holds barred creative discussion, where all ideas are considered, recorded, evaluated.

If things are too rigid, or there are too many distractions, or a left-brained leader is killing fresh ideas because they don't yet make sense, then you need to change your surroundings. Phase 1 involves immersing yourself in all the analytics, personas, positioning, and product awareness you can. This might mean wearing the product (shoes, purses, cosmetics) living inside the product (cars), demoing the product (fly fishing rods and reels, FitBit, Google Glasses), or even eating the product (got milk).

Phase II involves looking at the problem from another angle. Maybe you need to spin your head around, walk through the door backwards, do whatever it takes to transform your reality just enough to put you in a different frame of mind (probably where that phrase originated). Maybe it takes a walk around the park, a stay at home day, a shower, or an off-site meeting. Whatever strategy you choose, I'll bet that you discover that your ideas have more force, more energy, more interest, and more human connection. Once we reach this stage everyone feeds off that energy. It's not a question of finding one idea, it's a question of choosing the best of several great branding ideas. And that's not a bad problem to have.