Strategic Creative: How Research Fuels Creative
Note: this is the third in a series of articles & posts on Strategic Creative Marketing
What is the relationship between research and creative? At first glance, the two activities couldn’t seem more unrelated. Market research quantifies the world—or at least your particular marketplace. It interprets your challenges and opportunities through hard numbers, reliable samples, and plus-or-minus observations. When well done, it can give you the ammunition you need to move your institution forward—there’s nothing like hard numbers to make a case for change.
Creative executions, on the other hand, are designed to elicit emotion, to drive the kind of emotional response that turns prospects into students, to drive conversion. To accomplish this, the work has to step out of the box, catch attention, and find appealing and meaningful ways to get your message across, build relationships with students, and move the needle on your recruiting goals. As I said earlier, creative wins at the point of sale.
Determining just where that point is, however, requires precise navigation, the kind that relies on the reliable insights research provides into how you are perceived in your marketplace. Now of course, the term “point of sale” usually refers to a physical location—those cardboard displays you run into in grocery aisles or at the Handimart. But here, I mean it in a slightly more abstract though more important sense—that gap between what you think of your institution and how your external audiences actually see you: the precise location, in other words, of their current emotional response towards you.
This location is what the creative needs to attack and address, the perception that needs to be changed. And the only way to understand those perceptions and what they mean is through careful, focused research. What else can the research tell creative? How about:
- Voice—by defining which audiences you should concentrate on, research guides creative to the right voice (language, messaging, tone, etc.);
- Style—by locating just how big or small the perception gap is, research tells creative how far it can go in approach (edgy, traditional, etc.); and
- Content—by defining specific goals (such as recruiting) the campaign needs to accomplish, research tells creative what kind of content to focus on.
Creative makes the research sing. The ability to narrow your focus on the problem the creative has to solve is the key ability for success in marketing. In my next post, I’ll talk about what a creative brief looks like and how it works.
Photo Provided by: 姒儿喵喵
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Maxinejohansen
