Championing creativity through the lens of your customer

Rather than fall into the tech trap, brands should be looking at it as a driver of creativity, says Zoe Eagle, creative agency co-chief, Accenture Song. “On the face of it, technology gives you a broader canvas for creative expression than ever before. It also enables us to understand people and culture better so we should all be getting more powerful and more creative thanks to technology.”

For Shelley Macintyre, chief brand officer at Allplants, the thrill of working in a challenger brand is “figuring out how to be the shining star creatively in a landscape when people are doom scrolling thousands of pieces of content the height of Statue of Liberty in a day.”

In performance-driven business, customer centricity can be lost in the rush to follow what the algorithms are favoring, she says, but all that does “is put you in the same group of hundreds of other businesses following the same algorithm – so you have to be a thumb stopper.”

What sometimes gets forgotten about in the homogenization of content is that people are chasing the same ideas. It’s not just about having a good product that meets its promise and is relevant to people’s lives at the right time – the equation is “doing all those things together, again and again, consistently with unexpected, unseen, interesting creative to improve and optimize to deliver a brilliant experience every time,” says Macintyre. “The power of data is using it in real time to make sure we’re delivering against the customer promise, and that we’re moving with their needs.”

And while it’s important to understand and adapt to macro trends happening, brands shouldn’t forget the things that we know to be true about human beings, adds Eagle.

“Creativity, at its most fundamental is about the unseen and the unknown,” she says. “It’s about that ability to make a lateral leap, to do something unexpected, to do something highly emotive. We know that is an incredibly powerful way of connecting with human beings. Brands have got to make sure they’re captaining the ship as they go through the crazy waves of change, rather than just being bobbed about by it. The brands that really last, the businesses that really scale are the ones that fundamentally stay true to who they are but express it through relevant lenses.

“Use technology, use data, use insight, use creativity in developing your brand strategy, make sure that you’re coming at culture, the consumer, the category, whatever it is, through something that is a differentiated, unexpected, delightful lens. Use that to define what you stand for on the promise that you intend to deliver. That gives you a brilliant foundation to be able to engage confidently with creative exploration. Ensure that you understand the data, and that you are using that insight as fuel for genuine originality and creativity, rather than as a blueprint for what you do next.”

Watch part three ‘Headline Act: raising the creative bar’ and catch up on previous episodes in this series, on The Drum TV.