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CREATIVE
STRATEGY
AND THE
BUSINESS
OF DESIGN
DOUGLAS DAVIS
—Douglas Davis
This is your brain on strategy in custom Spencerian script. It's a beautiful mind. thinkhowtheythink.com
CONTENTS
Foreword by Dr. Marjorie Kalter
Introduction
PART I | A Designer Caught in the Headlights:
Creative Business Solutions
CHAPTER 1 Welcome to the Other Side of the Brain:
Business Concepts Creatives Should Understand
CHAPTER 2 Emerging from the Cocoon:
The Benefits of a Strategic Approach
CHAPTER 3 What They Say versus What We Hear:
Translating Client Requests
PART II | Finding Inspiration in Order:
Gathering and Organizing Information
CHAPTER 4 You Talkin’ to Me?:
Reaching Your Target on Behalf of the Brand
CHAPTER 5 The Cord-Cutter Struggle:
Understanding Features, Benefits, and Values
CHAPTER 6 Think How They Think to Do What We Do:
Implementing the Creative Strategy Framework
CHAPTER 7 Getting Knee Deep:
The Advanced Strategy Session
CHAPTER 8 Finding the Gold: Turning Data and Insights
Into Creative Business Solutions
PART III | The Strategy Behind the Execution:
Developing and Presenting Your Work
CHAPTER 9 Beyond “Make It Pretty”:
Positioning, Pitching, and Leading the Client
CHAPTER 10 Where’s the Map?:
11 Questions a Creative Brief Should Answer
CHAPTER 11 Matchmaking:
Aligning Target, Channel, and Messages
CHAPTER 12 Sell Without Selling:
Preparing Yourself to Present
PART IV | Stayin’ Alive: Building
a Successful Career
CHAPTER 13 How to Take a Punch in the Face:
7 Tips for Surviving As a Creative
CHAPTER 14 Dragon Slaying:
Successfully Managing Fear
CHAPTER 15 Portfolios Are Like Cartons of Milk:
Word Problems from Relevant Practitioners
About the Author
“ It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the hands of the right designer, a word is worth a thousand pictures.”
—TONY DI SPIGNA,
Typographer and Distinguished Professor
FOREWORD BY DR. MARJORIE KALTER
In Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Douglas Davis provides “creatives”—designers, art directors, copywriters, and content providers—with a framework for their concepts to succeed. This higher level of success entails understanding and achieving the business objectives of the design project. As he writes in the Introduction, “Let’s start with what we weren’t taught.” With this book, designers have a guide that fills in gaps for skills that aren’t the subject matter of design school or the focus of internships, freelance work, or company training programs. That’s because these skills haven’t been considered essential or even appropriate for a creative role.
Awards for advertising effectiveness used to be rare; daily, weekly, and monthly measurement of a campaign’s achievement of its goals used to be the purview of direct marketers. But that was the past. The proliferation of data has made it a possibility as well as a responsibility for every professional in the field of marketing communications to understand how business goals are set and how they are measured. With the growth of digital marketing, social media, and the technology for data collection, management, and analysis, data can and should be part of the brief for every campaign. Chief Marketing Officers, brand managers, product managers, and entrepreneurs have dashboards on their laptops and tablets to track quantitative campaign response and qualitative trend data. Market research to elicit survey data can be conducted online. Consumer and even business-to-business response through social media is immediate—sometimes it’s so rapid and dramatic that new or incremental design work is needed
right away.
It is no longer sufficient for a campaign to be a big idea that generates awareness. To be successful, it has to be on strategy, trend positively with its target audience, and meet the projected metrics. When the design-school approach isn’t matched by keen attention to the business goals, the campaign is at risk. The business may also be at risk.
One of my keenest memories of this is an agency presentation to AT&T. The clients were looking forward to seeing concepts to launch a loyalty program, and the agency was well prepared to show the first round of communications, which would use postal mail to reach the target audience. In the preceding days, account management, strategy, and production had met with creative to review and narrow down the concepts. The group selected three for presentation at the meeting. All three were on strategy for the brand and the campaign, had powerful graphics and messaging, and fulfilled all elements of the creative brief, including cost for production. What could go wrong? In the client conference room, the atmosphere was good. As the senior executive and account director leading the meeting, I was pleased. There was every reason to believe that we would get approval to proceed. At that point, the creative director suddenly stood up and announced that it was too soon to make a decision. He had a surprise, something more he wanted to show. (Whatever your professional stage, I’m sure you will agree that when your team is presenting, there should not be anything presented that is a surprise to anyone on your team.) So when the creative director went on to assert “You’re going to love this new concept. I love it,” I saw the meeting, the launch, and the business sliding away, as though the conference table had been tipped at a sharp angle. The surprise concept was a tiny envelope—a very tiny envelope. The designer hoped the diminutive size would “break the clutter” and get noticed in the mailbox.
“It’s a joke, right?” asked one of the clients tactfully. Her colleagues were more pointed, expressing alarm that the agency would present a concept requiring special, costly print production and not meeting postal specifications for mailing. The meeting ended quickly. There were no further surprises: they did not approve any of the concepts that day. We kept the business, but not the creative director. In an experience like this meeting, one might want to defend the concept and argue for a way to overcome cost, production, or delivery barriers for a breakthrough design. The point of a book like this is that if a concept merits innovation, disruption, or change, you can and should be prepared to lead the discussion about why and how it would be feasible. The creative director was not prepared to do that. He hadn’t considered any of those issues; his recommendation was based on subjectivity: “I love it.” Subjectivity is not a compelling rationale for a business decision.
As Douglas Davis shows, the designer needs to understand more than design, to know all she or he can about the brand or organization, the target audience, the marketing strategy and goals, and the business itself. With his perspective as designer and teacher, he is able to bridge these
elements. In my own dual-career path, as a professor who became a marketer and then became a professor (again), I saw the value that my experience as an advertising executive brought to the classroom, and I saw that what is—unfortunately and inappropriately—termed “real-world experience” has even more value as social media continues to transform marketing. In the immediacy and transparency of virtual conversations and image-driven content, the marketer who has both theory and practical knowledge is prepared to evaluate the relative qualitative and quantitative cost and gain of a campaign or an Instagram posting.
Those in creative roles, especially, need to be prepared for the current and future marketplace. We don’t know what the next wave of technology will bring to this field, but we do know there will be successive such waves, and they will demand more than big ideas and powerful design. In your work, you seek a competitive edge. A guidebook can be that edge, introducing you to methodology, terminology, and skills that can help you to achieve professional goals. The key to a good guidebook is the author’s firsthand knowledge of the terrain. When Douglas was a student in my marketing-strategy classes, his ability to share his extensive design experience made him very popular with classmates, especially in courses where students developed sample campaigns. That ability also demonstrated that he would be a great teacher, as he proved to be when he joined the faculty after completing his graduate degree in marketing. It isn’t possible for every designer to be a student in his classes. But this book is a highly readable and informative way to learn from him.
Marjorie Kalter, PhD
Former Director and Clinical Professor Graduate Program in Integrated Marketing, New York University
INTRODUCTION
My grandfather had a standing lunch date with a well-known conservative talk radio host. And that is how the host and I met, during lunchtime, standing in my grandparents’ kitchen in South Carolina. I couldn’t have been more than eight and by this time, I had heard my grandfather chuckle when referring to the things that ol’ host would say for years. One day the host was ranting in a particularly offensive manner that registered as such in my still-forming second-grade brain. In my shock, I couldn’t help but ask my grandfather, “Granddaddy, do you hear what he’s saying, how can you listen to this!?” And without needing a moment to collect his thoughts, our family’s wise gray-haired patriarch said with a smile, “I want to know what they think.” Those seven words introduced my eight-year-old mind to the simple concept of seeking to understand the point of view opposite my own, and that’s what this book is about.
At some point during my career, I realized that I lost creative battles because I was ignorant of the larger business or marketing considerations that informed aesthetics. I could write the design proposal, build the team, design or direct the executions, and pitch the ideas—yet I can remember times when none of this served me. Why? I didn’t have the whole picture.
Then one day I stumbled into a strategy session. It was a completely new experience. The format was like brainstorming, but for a chess match. The discussion centered on trying to understand who the consumers were for this national sandwich shop we were pitching. What motivated them and why? How would our product fit within their lifestyle choices? Could we credibly position our product as a viable choice for them?
In that one meeting, where I had no formal strategy training to rely on, no concept of business, and no polished marketing vocabulary to add to the discussion, it all began to make sense. This was that thing that beat me. I recognized it, though I didn’t understand it, and yet I did have a whole career of carrying out the result of meetings like this. I decided to become what I refer to as “a creative who understands business.” So I applied to the Master’s in Integrated Marketing program at New York University. The program was laser-focused on brand strategy, digital marketing, analytics, operations, and competitive strategy. The result of adding left-brained strategic thinking to a right-brained creative problem solver equals clarity on the relationship between business objectives, marketing strategy, and the creative product.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design came about as the result of my need to explore the words behind the pictures, understand the strategy behind the execution, and know the business objectives involved in the design process. You’ve also probably been impacted by this shift toward strategy in several ways, including a change in what your headhunters call you for, a broadening of the expectations the client has coming into a job, or the types of skills you’ve had to gain as a professional to remain relevant. A designer, copywriter, or freelance art director’s success is now measured in metrics that include sales, downloads, page views, click-throughs, time on site, shares, likes, retweets, and ROI (return on investment). The results determine whether the effort was successful, creative, or worth trying again.
My goal in this book is to expose you to the peripheral marketing and business considerations that affect your job. And I hope that the book gives useful guidelines on how to think versus what to think. Learning the language of business helped me win more business and get more design work, and I’d like to share what I’ve learned to help you do the same.
Whether you are a creative focused on how beautiful the work can be, an account manager focused on pleasing the client, a new-business hunter focused on winning new accounts, or a marketer moving the needle on the metrics, creative problem-solving is a team sport with the same goal. So the question is: how do we begin with completely different points of view and responsibilities but end with a cohesive creative business solution? That’s what this book will tackle. I’ll present a translation from marketing-speak or business jargon into strategic tools that will help you or your team develop more relevant creative work. But that’s just one side. I also invited some friends from the business side of the brain—marketers; brand, media, and communications strategists; writers; business people; planners; etc.—to detail their approach. Through them, you’ll encounter the other people that we must work with to make it happen.
Let’s start with what we weren’t taught. As creative people, designers, art directors, writers, and those studying to become creative professionals, we were taught how to solve the creative portion of the client’s problem. And we are good at it. So good, in fact, that clients can’t help reason that since you’ve come through for them so many times with the execution—you must know strategy! The problem with this expectation is that it zeroes in on the very area that is outside the scope of what most of us were taught in design school: strategy. In D-school, we were taught to focus on the tactical parts of strategic decisions without even knowing what these strategic decisions entail. So when faced with a client’s “tell me what to do, this or that” question, we may feel pressure to give a tactical this or that answer. Without any understanding of the marketing or business considerations that should shape this answer, any answer is at best incomplete. On the other side of the brain are the suits. As components of business, marketing, brand, or account management, many B-school programs are adept at imparting analytical thinking, competitive strategy, and marketing tactics. And they’re good at it. Yet none of this teaches the skill of how to communicate in a way that gets the most out of the creative team. Stellar communication ability should be the common denominator among the creative and business players in the project, but this is where what we weren’t taught makes the process harder. So here’s what I’m proposing we do about it.
In Part I, A Designer Caught in the Headlights, I’ll discuss the evolving role of a creative in a business and marketing context. You can think of this as the crash course in business and marketing for creatives.
In Part II, we will move into how to gather and organize all the relevant information you’ll need to build creative solutions that are based on sound strategy, solve business objectives and lead the client.
In Part III, I’ll give you what you need to develop and present your work. You’ll find tips on collecting feedback and leading discussions in a constru
ctive and meaningful way—away from the typical subjective comments such as “I don’t like it.”
We finish in Part IV, with the information you’ll need to increase the value of your contribution to your clients and your career.
You’ll also find a compilation of fourteen creative assignments from creative professionals that mirror recent requests their clients have asked them to solve. You can use these assignments to flex your new, strategy-based creative solutions to refresh your portfolio.
Over the course of my career, I’ve become increasingly focused on the thinking behind how things look. The inspiration behind the image. The words behind the pictures. I believe that if we can improve the communication within the creative process, we can improve the creative product. There is a big opportunity at the intersection of business strategy and creative execution, but leveraging it requires understanding what they think.
Thanks, Granddaddy.
PART I
A Designer Caught in the Headlights: Creative Business Solutions
1 Welcome to the Other Side of the Brain
Business Concepts Creatives Should Understand
It was only sixty minutes into my first statistics class—in the first week of my first semester at New York University—but I was already exceeding my median threshold for pain. Why was this a good idea again? I already had a Master’s degree from Pratt Institute and a thriving career as a freelance art director who even taught an undergraduate class or two on the side. Nothing from the last hour was in any way familiar. What the hell did I just do? Each class I would fall further and further behind on the calculating and formulas and steps. Everything in me screamed This is the wrong side of the brain! I felt like Charlie Brown—everything I heard sounded like “wah-wah, wah-wah-wah-wah.” I asked the professor for help. I asked my classmates for help. I failed the midterm. I paid a tutor for lessons twice a week and I wanted to quit before it all had really even begun. Though everyone else was competing for the highest score, I was only determined to make sure this class didn’t defeat the whole purpose. On the final day, I slowly flipped my exam over and opened my eyes to see what I scored, and lo and behold, I was overjoyed to see that after my absolute best effort, I passed with a C. Academic probation never felt so good.
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