Do you feel like your Brand & Creative partners are building incredible videos, images, and other assets but their outputs may not fit with your business needs? The “Brand & Creative for Marketers” cheat sheet will help you frame your marketing impact in a way that Brand & Creative teams can understand and appreciate.
Introduction to the Cheat Sheet series
As a marketer, we spend a lot of our time thinking about the customer, the psychology, and the creativity of the campaigns, activations, and initiatives we produce. We’re like artists painting a Picasso or musicians scoring a Mozart. Sometimes, in the midst of our artistry, we forget the science of marketing. We forget to ask ourselves the burning questions that our partners (e.g. Finance, Product, Tech, etc.) like to know:
Why is marketing important? How do you know it’s working? Why should I care?
We used to be able to say “we trust our gut” or “it’s standard” but those days are gone. Now, we need data to support and validate our intuition.
As part of this Cheat Sheet series, we will breakdown some of the most important parts of our partner teams’ jobs and goals so marketers will have a better way of communicating our impact to them as well as be better business partners.
Brand & Creative
for Marketers
Role of Brand & Creative
Brand is a shortcut for customers to understand what a business (or organization) has to offer [1]. For example, instead of reading a whole paragraph about the business, seeing just the logo or the brand name is enough to help a customer make the connections. Take Apple for instance. Seeing the Apple logo or hearing about Apple is enough for customers to understand the CX is very simplistic and intuitive and that most people who identify as ‘creative’ use Apple products. Similarly, seeing Coca-Cola’s red and white waves would help customers immediately think about the fizz of the pour or how it’s associated with ‘happiness’ (e.g. connected to trips to Disneyland, winning at sports games). These brands have taken painstaking steps to ensure positive connection between their brand (business) with specific value propositions with the goal to get customer engagement (and eventual revenues).
Brand & Creative team’s remit is to create a strong and positive brand image that effectively promotes the company and its products or services. Some companies and organizations have in-house Creative & Brand teams while others leverage the services of agencies. Irrespective of where the Brand & Creative team sits, they:
- Develop and execute the visual and messaging elements of a company’s marketing efforts. This includes creating and maintaining a consistent brand identity through all forms of communication, such as logos, packaging, website design, and advertising campaigns.
- Communicate the brand’s values, personality, and positioning to the target audience in a way that resonates with them and distinguishes the brand from its competitors.
- Develop creative content such as videos, social media posts, and other marketing materials.
[1] Though the majority of the article is written through the lens of a business, this cheat sheet holds true for non-profit or for-profit organizations.
What does this mean for Marketers?
- Treat your Brand & Creative team as partners. Marketers need their Brand & Creative partners. Marketing and Brand & Creative are two different sides of the same coin. Marketers build the strategy (e.g. talking to the right customers at the right time with the right message) whereas the Brand & Creative folks build the content necessary to deliver the message. By treating Brand & Creative as your partners, you elevate their involvement to have ‘skin in the game’. Instead of just pumping out assets for you, they become stakeholders. Be open to feedback and ideas from the Brand & Creative team. These professionals often have a deep understanding of design and messaging principles, and their insights can help marketers create more impactful and effective campaigns, e.g. how to induce emotions from flat imagery, how colors represent a shortcut to emotions, how all the digital assets complement each other to tell a broader narrative.
- Provide your business goals in your Creative Brief. The Brand & Creative team leverages the Creative Brief as the basis for their development. Oftentimes, marketers don’t provide enough detail within the Creative Brief for these teams to understand the ultimate goal and intent. According to a survey of 500 respondents from marketing charts, 28% of creatives cited a lack of detail on creative briefs as their top challenge. Whether you’re writing the Creative Brief for your internal or external creative partners, writing the Creative Brief is both an art and science. You want to provide enough context for the team to understand what your goal is without being too prescriptive and too limiting for these ‘artists’. Include information such as brand positioning or purpose, value propositions (emotional as well as functional), customer insights (demographic, psychographic, tension points), and how you plan on measuring success.
- Communicate clear deliverables and manage volume of asset needed. The Creative & Brand teams need at least 3-4 weeks to ideate before building out all the assets. And, if you’re making videos, you’ll need even longer lead times for development and production. Thus, be very clear what you’re expecting and when. marketing charts noted that the top two challenges for Creative & Brand teams include the speed at which creative teams are expected to work (5.44) and the volume of demand for creative work (5.35), with 7 indicating most challenging.
Vocabulary
- Asset – Files marketers upload to provide marketing content, e.g. image files, rich media files, and HTML5 files.
- Creative brief – A document that outlines the goals, target audience, and key messaging for a marketing or advertising campaign.
- Creative concept – The big idea or central theme that drives a marketing or advertising campaign.
- Design elements – The visual components of a brand or marketing materials, such as layout, color, imagery, and typography.
- Identity– The visual elements that make up a brand, including the logo, color palette, and typography.
- Messaging – The key points and ideas that a brand wants to communicate to its audience.
- Positioning – How a brand positions itself in the market, relative to its competitors and in the minds of its target audience.
- Styleguide – A document that contains design guidelines for each repeatedly used design element, such as visual identity elements, icons, interface components, and their states, headings, etc.
- Tagline – A short, memorable phrase that sums up a brand’s key message or proposition.
- Tone of voice – The personality and style of a brand’s communication, including the language and words it uses.
- User experience (UX) – The overall experience of a person using a product or service, including the usability, accessibility, and enjoyment of the product.
Key phrases to say to Brand & Creative partners
- “Tell me about your thought process behind this concept.”
- “What are your ideas to create an emotional response along with this call to action?”
- “What is the right workback schedule?”
Related questions
- How can marketers effectively collaborate with brand and creative teams to achieve their marketing objectives? To effectively collaborate with brand and creative teams, marketers should clearly communicate their marketing objectives, provide constructive feedback on ideas and designs, be open to new ideas and suggestions, and set clear deadlines and expectations.
- What are the key responsibilities of brand and creative teams in the marketing process? The key responsibilities of brand and creative teams in the marketing process include developing and executing the visual and messaging elements of marketing campaigns, creating and maintaining a consistent brand identity, and communicating the brand’s values, personality, and positioning to the target audience.
- How can marketers ensure that the brand and creative team understands their vision and goals for a marketing campaign? Marketers can ensure that the brand and creative team understands their vision and goals for a marketing campaign by clearly communicating these goals from the outset, providing detailed briefing documents, and holding regular meetings to discuss progress and address any issues that arise.
- What are some common challenges that marketers and brand and creative teams face when working together, and how can they be overcome? Common challenges that marketers and brand and creative teams may face when working together include misalignment on marketing objectives, misunderstandings or miscommunications, and differing perspectives on design and messaging. These challenges can be overcome by maintaining open and effective communication, being open to compromise and finding solutions that work for all parties, and being proactive in addressing any issues that arise.
- How can marketers measure the success of their marketing campaigns that have been developed in collaboration with brand and creative teams? To measure the success of marketing campaigns developed in collaboration with brand and creative teams, marketers can use a variety of metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, sales and revenue, and brand awareness. It’s important to choose the right metrics for your specific goals and to track them over time to see how your campaigns are performing.
