How many brands do you think you interact with on a daily basis? From the moment you wake up to the time you go to bed, it’s estimated that nearly half of an adult’s day is consumed by content and branding with up to 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day. As of May 2019, the total world population was 7.7 billion, and of that 4.4 billion people have internet access, 3.5 billion of whom have active social media profiles.
Over the past few decades, marketing strategies have followed the timeline of the era’s development. From mass marketing (1860s-1920s), direct marketing (1920s-1940s), and social and digital media marketing (2010-present).
With the adoption of data-driven strategies, the era of digitization has changed the way companies conduct business operations and advertise. Increased access to digital media has influenced and reshaped the way consumers think, act and buy. It also forces the retail industry to thrive in order to survive.
Today, consumers are using more devices, ad blockers and privacy protection tools than ever before, not to mention having expectations of an increasingly sophisticated customer experience.
The brand of your business must be known by many people in times of the incessant ‘noise’ of social media and dwindling attention spans.
As a result, new marketing strategies demand personalization, contextualization, and dynamics, as well as creative thinking, in essence, to compete for audience attention.
Contents
1 Building Creative Minds in Marketing Strategy
1.1 What is creative thinking in marketing strategy?
1.1.1 Personalization
1.1.2 Contextualization
1.1.3 Dinamisme
2 The role of data in marketing
3 Design Thinking in Action
4 Why is Creative Thinking Important in Marketing Strategy?
5 Skills Needed for a Creative Marketing Strategy
Building Creative Minds in Marketing Strategy
What is creative thinking in marketing strategy?
Historically, the term ‘marketing creative’ referred to the person responsible for the images, words and concepts of an advertising campaign. But marketing, like any other corporate function affected by technology, has become much more complex and demanding. To understand it broadly, the focus of a creative marketing strategy can be summarized in three ways:
Personalization
The company treats each customer as an individual by understanding their preferences and behavior. In a CMO/SAP Board survey, 47 percent of respondents said they would leave a brand that provided a poor, impersonal, or frustrating experience. In response, CMOs allocate nearly a third of their budget to improving their marketing technology.
Contextualization
Context plays an important role in the performance of a marketing campaign. In an interview with Dr. Horst Stipp, ad effectiveness researcher at The Advertising Research Foundation, he shares, ‘Positive effects have been demonstrated when advertisements are placed in contexts in which consumers engage, pay attention and value, and when there is congruence between context and advertising message.
Dynamism
With platform enhancements that allow brands to automatically promote the most relevant items, you can use dynamic and responsive advertising to your strategic advantage.
Facebook, for example, allows dynamic ads to automatically show the right products to people who have shown an interest in websites, apps, or the Internet as a whole. Similarly, through Google’s responsive display ads, advertisers can upload their creative assets and submit ad creations to Google’s algorithms.
The role of data in marketing
When you create digital marketing focused on customer experience powered by the right technology, you must stick to the goal of all of this.
The goal of everything you do is to shift marketing from an activity focused on customer acquisition to an activity that enables an emotionally human experience, while being data-driven: what works, what doesn’t, how can we improve?
In the marketing experience, companies treat each customer as an individual by understanding their preferences and behavior. To meet this expectation, the company’s marketing strategy must use both qualitative and quantitative.
When you fail to understand the complexities of your customer behavior, people lose trust in your company, this will directly impact the revenue and brand loyalty you build.
Design Thinking in Action
Separately, the concept of cross-industry design thinking is being used by a growing number of businesses; a solution-focused, problem-solving way of addressing individual or company-related problems. Building design thinking allows system users to have a more structured plan to understand innovation and grow more as a company.
Iconic brands and fully digital companies like Google, Uber and Apple are demonstrating revenue and customer satisfaction that can be driven by design thinking. Leveraging qualitative insights, creativity and a full focus on end-user needs, current approaches are aimed at innovating products, services, effective marketing strategies and maximizing company performance.
Why is Creative Thinking Important in Marketing Strategy?
Whenever someone is connected to the digital world, they are contributing to rapid growth globally. In globalization, where every brand competes for audience and market share, it takes creativity to differentiate one brand from the next.
In a world where we are taught to value facts and figures, creativity can hold a reputation for being gentle, instinctive, hard to measure or measure. However, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the five skills predicted to be needed in the future are complex problem solving, critical thinking, human resource management, coordination with others, and creativity.
While technology has evolved, it hasn’t changed the creative need for big ideas in an institution or company. It becomes the center of marketing, branding, and business strategy.
In a Harvard Business Review study conducted with senior marketing executives across top brands, interviewees were asked to share examples of creativity in marketing strategies that go beyond advertising campaigns and deliver real value to businesses. These findings present some creative thinking tips:
Create with consumers, not just for consumers
Given that today’s customers are not just consumers, but active social media users and tech-loving content creators, creativity in marketing involves working with customers from the start. This is the new definition of being ‘customer-centric’.
Make everyone part of the team
Creative marketing involves more than paid advertising in magazines or newspapers. By inspiring the creativity of others, and treating everyone as an extension of the marketing team – employees, partners, and even customers – provides insight into the behaviors, tastes, and opinions that serve marketers’ intentions.
Bring creativity to brand identity
The proliferation of new media channels, platforms and tools means consumers have greater access to brand stories, and marketing has more ways to convey their brand identity and vision. From email marketing to video campaigns, it opens up a field of creative ways to get a message across, sell a product, or form a relationship.
Rise to the startup mentality
Creative marketing operates more and more like entrepreneurs, adopting business practices and work cultures similar to those of Silicon Valley startups; the ability to develop continuously and continuously adapt the strategy.
Respect every part of the experience
Today, businesses must provide an outstanding customer experience to outperform the competition. Understand what a positive customer experience is, and how you can make it better.
Skills Needed for Creative Marketing Strategies
With the rapid development of new technologies, most of which are designed to help marketing professionals better understand their audience and analyze data.
Today’s marketing specialists need to be multi-skilled and have a clear understanding of multiple media channels, the ability to identify opportunities, sensitivity to the world at large, a balance of critical and creative thinking skills, and a solid understanding of corporate values.
Together, these characteristics can help drive measurable success for their business or company. It is essential for today’s marketers to collaborate, communicate and solve problems. Moving away from focusing on ‘left brain’ skills, marketing also requires right-brain creativity.
In the early days of artificial intelligence (AI) where anything that can be automated will become, it’s important for marketers to take a human approach. Creativity and innovation play a major role in achieving competitive advantage in the era of massive noise and disturbance.
It’s not about how much money the company spends but how it’s spent. Creativity is the vehicle that enables messages to be remembered, which, as we’ve seen from the likes of Dove, Coca-Cola, Google, or Apple can lead to higher brand recognition and sales.
Marketing is in a unique position to integrate ideas, insights and creativity to illuminate what people need and want.