Providing brand value through creativity

Brands are not born overnight, they require extensive planning, strategy and insight.

The old adage ‘Knowledge is everything’ is very true - the more you know at the beginning, the more confident you can be through the brand journey.

Knowledge helps to create a unique place from which a brand can shine.

Standing out is key - it can make or break a brand and that is where insights play a pivotal part.

It is always nice to have an emotional hook, but not all brands can do this at the beginning, some need time to carve out a story and a following. Creativity isn’t just a pretty picture and a nice headline.

As Bill Bernbach once said, “it’s our job to bring the dead facts to life” and as a creative, it’s our job to look at things in a different way, hoping that no-one else has already thought of it.

We mostly think of creativity as being about brand identity, ad campaigns and pull-up banners, but it is about looking at the whole picture; building brand values across all touch points with both existing and potential customers. Multichannel advertising, packaging, PR, website, social media, rep training and internal communications all contribute to this picture but we believe personality profiling offers another layer.

Traditional marketing assumes communicating with your audience based on the outward traits they present to the world; age, race, gender and location.

However, targeting people through demographics, lifestyle and behaviour only unveils half the picture. The key to communicating effectively is in understanding how people view the world and what values they hold. Personality profiling helps create the right tone to make a brand ‘speak’ in the right way to the right people.

That’s creative!

Tracey Henry is owner and creative director of Grace Comms Ltd