In consumer advertising, brand and product promises are often based on pure fiction. ”The product” is not primarily its function but the idea of who you are, who your targeted individuials want to be, as part of a special community. All visualized or dramatized for easy recognition in ads, events, retail display, and product packaging. Creativity is used to bring the fiction alive.
In business, “the product” is real and ultimately related to the targeted audience’s bottom line. Here, creativity can be used to define, explain, bring attention to, prove, and confirm the real value of the product, solution, or service and its supplier.
Sure, a b2b brand may also be charged by emotional or fictional ideas, but please handle that insight with discretion. They are PROUD to be rational, responsible, professional ... and PAID to make 100% rational buying decisions. Internally they should always be ready to motivate and defend their buying decisions and preferences in terms of increased revenues, lowered costs, eliminated risk …
Sometimes, an entire industry needs to defend its very existence. In recent decades, environmentalists have, for example, turned against the automotive industry. Beside communicating the progress of ongoing product development, the public may also need to be reminded about the inherent benefits of the fundamental product idea.
Many years ago, I and my art director partner Åke were assigned by a major manufacturer of stainless steel. Steel manufacturing consumes huge amount of electricity, a fact frequently shamed by the environmental movement at the time.
The client’s brief was simple: We can not avoid the electricity issue. It is what it is, so try to redirect the focus to other environmental aspects. Remind the environmentalists, policy makers, and the general public that steel can be recycled and repurposed again and again, saving truckloads of natural resources. And remember that environmentalists and policymakers are rarely tech savvy, so make it easy to grasp for anybody.
My brilliant AD partner spontaneously came up with a (nearly) final headline summarizing the key benefit. An idea easy to vary with different examples without boring the audience to death. And, importantly, easy to translate into other languages. Because the creativity was in the idea, not in wordplay. As a writer, I simply had to look for interesting examples and fill in the details. A prime example of creative teamwork. And of b2b creativity.
The creativity in Phyron is in the idea of mass-customized ads, combined with enhanced visual quality, and automated ad creation and publishing.
To save you the trouble of looking it up: the headline in the Swedish-language ad above reads ”Here comes your old kitchen sink at 300 kms per hour.”
