Going rogue, doodling, and mixing strategy and creative
A recipe for exploring creative and strategy simultaneously
There’s a moment that I’ve come to call “the leap” where strategy is parked and creative is started. Sometimes it’s graceful, sometimes it’s not.
Creative without strategy is art. Strategy without creative is theory. To this I say…
One of the goals we were pushing as a creative team was to do more “going rogue” and play harder so that we were pushing creative territory hard, then reining it back in — not the other way around. We needed a tool to get our brains to work across strategy and creativity. A playground, a place to be silly, a place to test the strategy, push it too far, throw things against a wall and see what would stick.
Our inspo
I’m not sure where I came across this case study originally but I fell in love with it. It’s worth the read. TLDR: Wieden + Kennedy’s London team was trying to develop a campaign platform for a Honda pitch in 2002. They needed to explore the strategy and the creative simultaneously.
The problem: Honda makes great cars, and people buy Hondas despite the brand, for the logical reason that the cars … just work. But they have very little connection beyond that. Honda realised this needed fixing and that brand could give them an edge beyond just the cars functionality.
Their brief:
- Create advertising which people notice.
- Create advertising which makes people think of Honda when they think about buying a new car.
- Create advertising which makes the brand a business asset and makes Honda a company society cares about.
- Launch three new cars.
- Use the tagline The Power of Dreams.
And create advertising which is so effective that they can decrease their media spend every year and still get to 5% market share in three years. Cool cool cool.
As the team investigated they realised a few things:
- the company culture truly did reflect the tagline, “maverick; feisty; inventive; still behaving as though their unpredictable engineering genius of a founder was stalking the corridors looking for engines to tweak.”
- The enemy of Honda was complacency — the complacency of the car industry
- Subtley and nuance were key to communicating. Most advertising / briefings separate what you say and how you say it…watering down both the creative and strategic intent.
As an exercise to address these things, they developed the Honda Book of Dreams, a book designed to sit in the glovebox of every new Honda they sold. More importantly, it served as “a thinking tool for exploring the Honda voice with maximum creative flexibility and maximum strategic input.” You can see the book they created here. Equally interesting, though is this APG paper about the development of the book (and the campaign platform).
To quote the paper, it’s about embracing complexity and nuance and overriding marketing’s tendency to embrace simplicity and reductionism. It rejects the creative brief and uses new tools. If you’ve ever looked at a proposition or a strategy and thought — that sounds slick, then looked at the creative later and thought it a bit dull — well, join the club. I think generally strategists are in danger of suffering from a love of their own work to the detriment of the actual work itself. Beautiful shiny decks, with no bridge to beautiful creative.
How we introduced it
After our monthly brand retrospective, where one of our team goals was to “go rogue” more often, I remembered the Honda case study…and wrote an essay in our Slack about how / why we could use the same method.
After an initial briefing, we all spent the next few days writing raps, haikus, sketching, dreaming up superannuation drinking games (wait for it…) and generally…playing. But playing with purpose. And what came out of the play was far more interesting and nuanced than straight creative briefs.
Some of my favourite things we’ve made / done:
- A poem courtesy of Jake Landa
- Brilliant doodling by Mariela
- A mashup of rap songs about money by Grace Palos
- A nod to Carl Sagan from Danny White
- A manual for changing systems by moi
- Brilliant error messages from Danny White
What we learned: repurposing, remixing, and alluding to culture brought us much closer to helping people realise the power of their money. Money doesn’t exist in a vacuum — so we shouldn’t talk about money in a vacuum. It’s directly related to the world around us. This exercise helped us explore the hidden power that’s around us and how to talk about it — without the pressure of having to produce a particular ad or application. We’re keeping the burn book (as we call it) as part of our regular brainstorming sessions, and we share it with freelancers to help them understand the spirit of the brand idea.
TLDR: Play with purpose
Whether you’re in a creative team in house or in an agency with lots of projects popping off all the time, the space for play and permission to be zany is critical. These are some of my favourite sessions, and looking back on this work over the last 6 months, these are some of the sessions that pushed the strategy further, introduced new life into the creative, laid the foundations for our brand idea. Win, win.
