A brand’s identity represents who it is and what it stands for. It encapsulates your brand’s perceived image and underlines your audience’s emotive response.
A creative concept underpins your brand’s fundamental marketing message. It guides campaign content and captures core themes to be communicated to your target audience.
Developing a creative concept from your brand identity helps your campaign make a greater impact across multiple channels. Ultimately, building a creative concept that is in line with your brand identity is imperative to crafting a meaningful campaign.
Here are 5 tips to help you encapsulate your brand identity in your creative concept.
1. Explore your brand identity.
Before getting started on a creative concept for your campaign, you should have a clear understanding of your brand identity and the elements of your brand’s experience that determine relationships between your customers and stakeholders.
Explore your brand identity in relation to:
- Archetypes
- Associations and values
- Personality
- Imagery
- How all of the above elements can be activated
2. Refer to your target audience analysis.
Your target audience analysis should clarify who your target audiences are, their triggers and functional and emotional needs. Although all of your audiences may not be targeted in this particular campaign, it’s important to use the analysis as a guide when developing your creative concept.
3. Find opportunities from your competitor analysis.
This practice is great for developing messages and themes that emphasize your brand’s point of difference. Integrate your competitor analysis and determine:
- Opportunities where your brand stands out from its competitors
- Potential messages from these opportunities
- Taglines that can be developed from your messages
- Core themes that arise
4. Consider visual elements.
Throughout each step, consider associated visual elements and how they can be used as graphical tactics throughout your campaign. Graphical tactics will later form a part of the narrative across your campaign and can reinforce campaign messages.
5. Define your campaign message.
Determine your campaign’s overarching lead message with a corresponding secondary message. A lead message is short and sweet and will drive your campaign while a secondary message supports it. If your campaign is made up of different elements for separate audiences, messages may need to be adjusted to consider each audience.
Talk to us about branding and creative concepts.
Image source: Markus Spiske.
