Strat House Co-Founder, Rachel Clarke, explores collective creativity and creative ownership across marketing, technology and processes.

In The House

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• Adidas takes on Samsung’s controversial ‘Night Owls’ ad in women’s safety campaign
• Unilever Study Reveals Influence of Influencers in Sustainable Behavior Change
• Dove are standing up for #KidsOnlineSafety
• Gong cha named best food & drink franchise at the 2023 Global Franchise Awards
• Find out why LinkedIn And Dove Are In It Together To Help End Hair Discrimination

Who owns creativity for a brand?

A common theme across a number of our current projects at Strat House is creativity – what is it, how to encourage creativity in a mass production environment and who owns the creative process.

Creativity is commonly associated with arts and entertainment rather than other aspects of life – “creative arts” is a far more common saying than “creative technology” but in our recent research for a public sector client, our team confirmed that people across the UK believed creativity could be found anywhere, across all STEM subjects and in everyday lives. Not just activities such as baking or hair styles, but in identifying creative solutions to organising children’s activities. 

One of the strongest findings that came out of our research was a recognition that collective creativity, people working together rather than lone geniuses, produced the best results, from the small scale to world-changing ideas. 

For us at Strat House, this means that the tools and tips to drive creative thinking should not just apply to the development of marketing communications, but also to many aspects of the process for developing business solutions (although maybe not accounting).

The Future of Creative Production

Creativity isn’t just the domain of the output, it can be woven into the technology and processes used by organisations. A recent client project on the ‘future of creative production in marketing’ has seen some of the most creative technology and process developments being used to ensure a future-facing operational solution to mass asset production. The use of fully virtual studios, products and people is becoming more common. When a client has the need to produce over 750k marketing assets per year, it’s about choosing when to put the effort in and how products are prioritised. If 80% of assets are for e-commerce that require rapid and efficient production, not every product needs a different creative approach. Instead the creativity is developed in batches, each season you review the approach and set out the standard guidelines – it’s a balance of creative thinking vs the need for saving costs, powered by creative technology.

At the other end of the scale are the tentpole projects, the big brand and product campaigns where you use the best teams you have, whether this is a creative agency or internal teams, to produce something that could be leading edge in both the approach and the technology used. We have found that the challenge here is about balancing three elements: The creative thinking of the teams; The reality of the companies’ platforms (where developing and maintaining stability is key); The rapidly changing consumer expectations for a digital shopping experience. If the best creative ideas from your teams never manage to be made because of platform constraints, then creative talent may look elsewhere, especially as fast moving platforms such as Shopify can create and deploy with speed.

Brand as Platform

It’s in the messy middle that we have found the most varied set of creative solutions, where collective creativity is driving innovation. One area we explored was “brand as a platform”, which we divide into two areas.  

The first area is outbound content – the disintermediation of ecommerce, where anyone can set up a shop to sell a brand’s products and the brand acts as the distributor. Within a rapidly changing ecomm landscape and shifts in consumer expectations, how far should you now let go of creative control? Should companies make stringent brand asset packs (as has traditionally been favoured by global brands) or perhaps relinquish creative control? Or is there a happy medium where there are creative guidelines produced that allow official sellers flexibility within guardrails.  

The second area is more prevalent currently, the rise of the creator – encouraging fans, buyers and influencers to create their own take on the brand and product marketing, which gets used by the brand across multiple channels. This could be as simple as using customer images using or wearing your products, such as used by Asos, or more complex activities where full campaigns are made by a range of people, in partnership but with a degree of autonomy that brands may not always be comfortable with. In these cases, creativity is no longer owned fully by the brand, but is an output of a wider, collective process. 

Collective Creativity

We’re working with brands on their approach to collective creativity – thinking about how they can continue to work with their customers in the creation of content and campaigns for use across the platforms. Because we know that customers want a little more than the “ideal” that was often previously used in marketing comms and want a little more reality added to the mix. And that ultimately collective creativity, across all aspects of business will ensure that companies and their brands have longevity in this rapidly changing world.