CHAT BACK: Good strategy creates great creative

Let me share a secret. Agencies don't create great brands. Great brands are created by the individual customers and the market.

By this I mean your brand is not your logo, identity or even your product. Your brand is the meaning and emotional response given to it by the people who are your customers.

Look at most business categories today. Pretty much every product and service has the same features and options. Our choices are limitless but our time to choose is limited.

In this environment, your advertising spend will never be enough to keep your business and sales ahead of the competition. The only way your business will really win and grow is with a strong, trusted and relevant brand.

In today's market, significance, substance and meaning are the currencies your brand must grow and develop.

Unfortunately there is no shortcut to unlocking, articulating and amplifying your brand's true significance in the minds of your customers.

The journey to unlocking this is often one of the most difficult steps in the marketing process. It is a challenge for many businesses but also it is vital to success.

The only way you get there is by bringing a total focus on what it is that really makes your brand different from all the others in the market.

You need a robust strategy that accurately identifies the objective you want to reach and you then need that strategy to accurately inform your creative solution that will go out into the market as the representation of your business promise -- a positioning statement.

Unfortunately, the map is in two parts and written in different languages.

On one side is the business and commercial strategy, on the other is creative and marketing.

One speaks in logical, analytical and numerical signals, the other is emotional, visual and intuitive. It is not easy to weld the two and this is way so many businesses end up reading only half of the map.

The first step to developing a solution and a strategy that links your business objectives with a meaningful creative solution is a sincere commitment by both sides to acknowledge the importance of each other's point of view.

Sustainable, defendable and highly valuable brands connect the rational with the emotional, the theoretical and the practical. Successful brands marry logic and intuition.

Failure to marry both sides results in weak and generic creative and even worse business results.

A really good strategy will identify and incorporate all the common objectives and where the company wants its business to be.

Execution and creativity without a clear strategic objective are worthless.

Time and effort spent on developing a focused strategy with a clear positioning statement that includes all aspects and views of the business will not limit creativity but liberate it and give maximum uplift to your business.

Too many brands and creative campaigns are the result of a creative team searching to help the client find a solution.