Approach
If you want to make an impact, you need a big idea. But there’s more to big ideas than a flash of inspiration. The diagram provides a way to channel your thoughts in a way that will deliver the most effective creative solution – and save you time and money.
Strategic Objectives
A Strategic Communication is designed to achieve a specific business objective. Without clear objectives, we have nothing to test our ideas against nor any way of measuring our performance or of taking measures to increase effectiveness. “We need a video,” is not a business objective, unlike “I want to increase sales by 10%,” which sets clear goals and enables the client to ask challenging questions such as, “How will this communication increase my sales by 10%?”
Audience Take-out
What do want the audience to take away from your communication. Do they need to understand certain facts, trust your judgement, be excited by your vision? Whatever it is, it must support your strategy. Moreover, a communication should not be forced to do too much. The more focused the objectives, the clearer and more successful it will be. If all this sounds blindingly obvious, you would be surprised how little thought is often given to the basics before embarking on a communication project.
Controlling idea
The creative concept needs to be guided by what is known as the controlling idea; your central message or proposition summarised in a single phrase? Without it, you are likely to be going round in circles looking for your big idea. For screen writers it’s a fundamental, the fulcrum on which the whole story turns, the essence of the movie. There are simple ones such as ‘crime doesn’t pay’ or ‘the ruthless pursuit of contemporary values will destroy your life’; and more abstract ones such as ‘belief systems as systems of control’; for the Matrix.
In business communication, controlling ideas are likely to be more prosaic: ‘Arson can be prevented if everyone takes personal responsibility’ or ‘Anti money laundering measures protect the bank’s reputation and increase customer trust.’
Simple though these ideas may be, you can see how they frame a message and provide creative direction. Big ideas that don’t work are often the product of a creative whim – a preconceived big idea about a big idea.
Messages
It helps to define what specific information you want the communication to deliver and to sign these off before you start.
Positioning
Positioning relates to how messages are packaged to meet the needs of a particular audience. The tone of voice, the choice of metaphor and the format of the communication all vary according to whom you are communicating with. The main variable is whether a communication is designed to inform or persuade.
This diagram shows the inverse relationship between the ability to inform and persuade in any communication. As you move the line to left or right you can see how the ratio between information and persuasion changes. This tells you that bombarding people with facts is unlikely to win hearts and minds. Business communications may lie anywhere along this continuum.
Theme
This is the creative glue that holds the messages together. Themes can combine visual metaphors or narrative elements. Sometimes the theme is extant, such as ‘back to the future’ or ‘unseen heroes’. Or it may be an expression of the controlling idea such as taking a customer perspective. Without a theme, you will have an uphill struggle to make your communication work. A theme I suggested for a motivational programme for a retail bank was, ‘Part of the Community.‘ It suggests how bank staff might see themselves beyond their job function, helping local people and local businesses. It’s very simple but had a huge impact on the content of the programme.
Context
Context changes everything. It’s the baggage that comes with every project; the history, the attitudes and expectations of the audience, it’s the market conditions and what the competition did yesterday.
Creative Solution
The creative solution is the big idea that encapsulates all of the above. By being creative in the way you communicate your messages, not only do you produce something that is memorable and hence more effective, you also tell the audience something about yourself. For an expanded version of this article in PDF format click here
