Creativity is at the core of building a successful brand and can be implemented throughout different tactics a brand embraces. Whether it is by learning through consumer research or imagining how consumers interact across channels, marketers need to get creative to help tell their story.
At a recent Brand Innovators Marketing livecast on Creative Transformation, marketers at The Hershey Company, MetLife, GoDaddy and Emporio Armani Retail Americas discussed their approach to creativity from product innovation to cause marketing.
Product innovation that adapts to consumer behavior requires creativity at The Hershey Company.
“From an industry perspective, we saw some common threads across multiple areas. One, consumers are more health conscious,” said Santhi Ramesh, CMO, International, Head of Marketing, Innovation, Growth, Insights & E-commerce, Digital at The Hershey Company. “The food industry had to adapt their portfolio to be more health conscious. Second, there was this boom in ecommerce with consumer shopping behavior shifting and the food industry had to adapt their channels and accelerate their ecommerce. Third, being at home shifted consumer media consumption. For the food industry, from an advertising perspective, we had to shift our media. Within Hershey, we tapped into all of these areas. We were agile, we were quick to serve these trends.”
For MetLife, creativity is about how to tell the brand story through every color, image, graphic and font used across its communications channels.
“When you think about the traditional building blocks of a brand and how those are created, developed and distributed, you’re often looking at what we would call a traditional brand guideline,” said Brad Blondes, VP, Global Head of Brand Creative & Design at MetLife. “This would be your identity system, you know all the photography, illustrations, graphics, colors, typography and all those things that traditionally have been used to build a brand. As we look through the lens of creative transformation, these building blocks have to become more modular and more adaptive. You have to demonstrate how those assets flex across not just traditional media, but also across digital media and expressions as well.”
GoDaddy is creative about its cause marketing efforts, focusing on authentic programs that will make a difference.
“With any cause-led branding or any messaging that you’re putting out, if you’re not really doing the hard work on the ground floor, it’s going to ring hollow no matter how pretty the pictures are or how well executed the design is,” said Adam Palmer, Director, Creative Production Ops, GoDaddy. “Unless you’re doing that hard work and making those laborious efforts, it’s going to fall on deaf ears. Authenticity, as we know, is a huge component to connecting and creating that engagement, as opposed to turning somebody off within the audience because it’s not clear that you’re making that extra effort and energy.”
