Planet Earth to Planet Marketing: “Do you still copy?”
Creativity can be incredibly powerful when done right, but marketers often miss the mark by relying on intuition and ignoring real-world concerns, as highlighted by Berten Peremans, Chief Strategy Officer at Publicis Groupe.
Creativity is powerful but often misused when marketers rely too much on intuition. To create effective campaigns, marketers need to connect with real people and diverse perspectives, using data and innovative methods. Understanding the real world is crucial for harnessing creativity effectively.
Creativity has a superpower when used correctly. That is what we call effective creativity.
However, the problem is that marketers (and their agencies, to be fair) often live on their own planet. This leads to mishits when they rely on intuition (that infamous gut feeling, you know?).
Apple’s recent ‘Crush!’ campaign for the iPad Pro is a good case in point. The campaign features an industrial press crushing various items, including musical instruments, until only an iPad remains. On Planet Marketing, no one anticipated the fear this would evoke among many artists about the future of their profession.
So how can a brand become so tone deaf to societal concerns, resulting in significant backlash?
This ‘disconnect’ often stems from a lack of curiosity and a lack of insight in human nature. Marketers too often reduce people to mere ‘consumers’. Or worse, to invented target groups with catchy names that don’t align with people’s actual lives. Have you ever seen a Culture Vulture struggle with a tax return? A Self-Actualiser picking his nose behind the wheel? An Urban Adventurer debating between white or pink toilet paper?
Marketers need to escape their fantasy planet and embrace creativity that respects the reality of actual people.
Escaping that planet means letting reality pervade our businesses. This starts by assembling a team that truly reflects the diversity of our society. However, diversity alone isn’t enough to be fully in touch with reality. There will still be times when even a diverse marketing team is out of sync with the target audience.
Therefore, it also means we must find new ways to observe reality. Marketers must obsessively focus on understanding real people. Since reality doesn’t unfold within a 10-meter radius of your desk, genuine curiosity about people is crucial. This curiosity should be supported and validated by data, collected through the implementation of innovative technology (data scraping, AI data aggregation, social listening, etc.) and disciplines that are sometimes overlooked, such as anthropology, ethnography and semiotics.
In short, only those marketers who heed Planet Earth’s call and build a bridge to the real world will gain access to the most valuable resource for effective creativity: real people.
Berten Peremans, Chief Strategy Officer, Publicis Groupe