How can you improve your creative or campaigns for better results?

I’m often asked by clients how they can improve their creative output. Either from their internal teams or occasionally from their agencies.

But to answer this question, I really need to tell you a story which provides a perfect example of how creative ideas can impact business, without the need for big budgets, but with the application of a little ‘strategic’ or ‘creative’ thinking...

In the mid-2000s, Mercedes-Benz merged with Chrysler Corporation to form DaimlerChrysler, and our clients at Mercedes in the UK suddenly found themselves with three new brands to market and support: Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge.

We worked at what was then considered the unglamorous end of car brands, aftersales. Which meant we dealt mainly with workshops, parts and accessories.

Passenger car marketing, by contrast, was considered the much more exciting place to be. These were the people working with the big London or European advertising agencies, creating those big budget tv campaigns shot on expensive locations and often with headline stars.

By contrast, our budgets were much more modest, even though most of a car’s profitability didn’t come from the sale of the car, but from aftersales.

There we were, then, with three distinctive brands (Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge), two of which we might consider ‘quirky’ but all chosen by customers who deliberately differentiated themselves from the typical German or other European brands.

And now we had a job to do. How could we market parts and accessories to those customers?

Typically, this might have involved a brochure, perhaps some ‘point of sale’, maybe an advertising campaign in print.

But then the client told us about a new development. Brabus, the company which tuned high-end Mercedes cars had created a new brand ‘STARTECH’ with a range of accessories for Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge.

If you considered that our buyers were already differentiating themselves from the herd, then STARTECH’s range of distinctive accessories allowed those customers to go even further in personalising their cars; changing the wheels, the grille, the exterior and interior to better suit themselves and their needs. Couple this with all the other practical accessories (from roof racks to dog mats), and here was a great story to tell.

But then comes that thorny question that often stumps us all when we’re looking at a blank sheet and a budget: What’s the best way to tell this story for the best result?

In some agencies, these questions are thrown at a creative team to solve. And clients (and their account handlers) can relax. That wasn’t and isn’t how we work.

If you have an internal resource (or that resource is you), you don’t necessarily have that luxury either.

And even if you do, how can you be assured that the ‘creative’ you’re presented with solves your problem? How can you assure yourself that this is, if not the right thing to do, at least a good thing to do? We’ve all seen great creative ideas, but we don’t always see them delivering results. Why?

Here’s what we do, and you can do too.

First, consider the customer. In this case, they were buying or at least considering buying a Chrysler, Jeep or Dodge. What did we know about them? Next to nothing, and since the brands were only recently acquired, we didn’t even have historic customer profile data to review.

What we did know was that these potential buyers weren’t put off by a different brand to the ubiquitous names we all know. So, they were happy to differentiate themselves.

Second, consider what problem you’re solving. If you don’t think there’s a problem, what value are you adding? In this case, the value we were adding was helping those customers who wanted to differentiate themselves even further.

?Third, what’s a good way to illustrate or communicate that ‘value’? What’s the best way to tell this story? How could we show customers that by accessorising their cars, they would be drawing more attention to them, making them stand out?

Already, you’re probably one step ahead and thinking like the creative team.

The three questions above become the foundations of your creative brief:

1. Who are the customers?
2. What problems are we solving for them (or what value are we adding)?
3. What’s the best way to communicate the value to the customer?

That’s the brief we gave our creative team and together we looked at how everyone else was telling that story. And in truth, they weren’t telling it very well.

Remember what I said about aftersales being considered the ‘unglamorous’ end of the car business? It certainly showed in some of the competitor materials we reviewed.

But we didn’t accept this had to be the case. These were great accessories that took already distinctive cars to a different level of appeal.

So we did what we thought would make the splash we needed. We decided to put the glamour back into aftersales.

Why couldn’t we mirror those glitzy photo shoots that accompanied the marketing of the car? Why couldn’t we go further, and quite literally make our accessorised cars into the ‘stars’ of our activity? You’re probably ahead of me, again.

So that’s exactly what we did.

With a modest budget of around ￡60,000, we went to Germany and staged a photo shoot with our hero cars as the stars. Working with a brilliant photographer called Ramon Wink, we created some stunning photography of the cars, the accessories and then a number of lifestyle shots. This is exactly what the teams in passenger car marketing would have done, and what our clients in aftersales were specifically discouraged from doing.?

When we put our creative into brochures and sent them to dealerships, we were overrun with requests to take our imagery and turn it into posters for customers, for office walls, for the workshops and showrooms.?

Dealers asked us for advertising, using the same imagery, so we created that too.?

And at the end of the first 12 months, we’d sold around ￡2million worth of accessories for that modest initial budget.

Because creativity isn’t about budgets. It isn’t (whisper it) even about clever ideas.

Creativity is about thinking.

It’s about solving problems. It’s what one of my many heroes Dave Trott calls ‘the upstream problem’. In simple terms, he describes seeing a river full of people who have fallen in struggling to swim and coming up with ideas to rescue them all to the safety of the bank. Whereas real problem solving is going upstream to find out why they fell in, and stopping it.

Real problem solving is asking why a customer would buy accessories for a car. Creativity isn’t about listing those accessories on a website or in a bland brochure and expecting them to sell themselves. Equally, creativity isn’t about a beautiful and glamorous campaign that doesn’t answer those basic questions:

1. Who are the customers?
2. What problems are we solving for them (or what value are we adding)?
3. What’s the best way to communicate the value to the customer?

If this kind of thinking sounds trite, sounds obvious, sounds like marketing 101, then congratulations. Because you’re already thinking creatively for better results.

And trust me, you’re one step ahead of the thousands who aren’t.

If you want to discuss this further, have ideas and feedback of your own, then I’d love to hear from you.

Over the coming weeks and months I want to share more examples like this that show how great creative ideas are usually rooted in the simplest solutions to age-old problems.

And if you’re worried that you just don’t think creatively often enough, I’d recommend a great book: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/albert-read/the-imagination-muscle/9780349134765/