There are many great examples of how creative concepts illustrate the brand values and key messages. We will go over just a few of them here, and analyse them from the perspective of what you can learn to help you.

Leading up to the creative concept, there is usually an interesting brand back story, clear and distinct brand values, a clear objective or some industry research that led to an insight. Taking time to analyse those areas can help to unlock great creative concepts.

Let’s delve deeper into it.

Guinness White Horses – 1999

The famous Guinness White Horses ad is regularly voted the best all-time concept in polls. The story here is that a group of surfers wait on an amazing beach for the perfect wave, they surf it and horses emerge from the surf. One surfer makes it through the wave (story arc/ resolution), and he celebrates back on the beach. In the story there is a quote from Moby Dick and the white horses are a reference to an 18th Century painting.

The concept manages to marry up several key objectives for the brand:

• Making Guinness appeal to a new younger demographic through style, visual effects, and the tapping into the spirituality of surfing
• Whilst appealing to a younger demographic, Guinness wanted to maintain a more sophisticated positioning compared to lager. This is achieved in part through the cultural references and beautiful, arthouse monochrome cinematography, music and voiceover
• Lastly with ‘good things come to those who wait’ which fits both surfing as a sport and the pour time of Guinness, they worked in that the pour time is a feature, not a bug that requires a patient, deeper thinking consumer

Dove Campaign For Real Beauty – 2004

In 2004 Dove launched The Campaign For Real Beauty, which upended the perceived wisdom in the beauty industry of how a beauty product’s ads should look. The perception of the brand is that the products are made with less harsh ingredients that are kinder to the body. The packaging design using off white and gentle colours and names of products like Pure & Simple reinforces that. So their brand values were clearly established.

You can see some of the images from the campaign here.

To understand how to carry this through to their advertising, they commissioned research that found that only 2% of women globally were willing to describe themselves as beautiful. This unsettling statistic combined with the insight that concepts of beauty are created and reinforced by culture, led to the concept for the hugely successful Dove campaign to celebrate diversity in beauty in all its forms, and to encourage body positivity and discourage media-enforced beauty stereotypes. The natural portraiture photography they chose fitted the style of a natural celebration of diversity.

One important thing to notice here is that upfront work and thinking and research about the market and their own brand values led them to the creative concept. Secondly, ‘standing for something’ should come from the brand values and be surfaced in the marketing content.

Dollar Shave Club – 2012

Your concept does not have to mean a gazillion dollar budget however. Let’s look at another more recent classic that launched a huge brand, Dollar Shave Club. Their video reportedly cost $4,500 to make and was shot in a day, yet it was their big breakthrough as a brand.

Dollar Shave Club is a subscription service for razors which is a tough business to change habits in. The video has had 27 million views and after the first 24 hours brought them in 12,000 new subscriptions.

Value is a central message for Dollar Shave Club, hence the name. However the challenge was to sell on value and quality at the same time. And to do it in an engaging way.

The concept for the video turns the lack of budget into a feature, which conveys the fact that you are not being charged to pay for the cost of celebrity endorsement.

They use humour to keep you engaged whilst they explain exactly why cheap doesn’t equal low quality. This gets to the heart of their business proposition, the brand values and why they started their company.

Unlike the Guinness example above, they had the challenge of people not knowing who they are and what they do, so they dealt with that in the first 10 seconds by stating their brand proposition. They also personalised the brand at the same time as handily, the CEO was trained in sketch and improv comedy.

Lastly they convey some brand values by talking about hiring policy, giving previously unemployed people work.

The whole thing is funny, genuine and warm, and you come away entertained but also have a strong sense of what Dollar Shave Club stands for. This is why working out the brand story and values before starting on the creative concept is essential.

Dumb Ways To Die – 2012

Dumb Ways to Die is a safety campaign by Metro Trains Melbourne targeted at improving safety and reducing unsafe behaviour around trains. To date, the video has 200 million YouTube views, and they also released an app which has been downloaded in different forms millions of times.

Looking at their website, this campaign doesn’t fit the mould too well in terms of understanding how it came about from Metro Train’s brand aesthetic and tone of voice. The website is, as you would expect, focussed around running a metro system; times of trains, fares etc. This campaign was a response to a very specific business problem; the issue of safety around trains and train lines.

The campaign target was primarily children, according to Chloe Alsop, Metro Train’s marketing manager. The creative team that came up with the idea spent a lot of time researching the safety reports to arrive at the insight that it is really hard to get killed by a train unless you do something reckless and stupid.

This insight is where the message ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ phrase originates from. The idea to do an animated video and song comes from defining the target. Creative artists then brilliantly turned it into something catchy, visually fun with some great dark humour.

The dark humour is an important aspect to it, as it means it works on several levels and will appeal to teenagers who I am guessing were the most at-risk demographic. Based on anecdotal experience, it would be a safe bet to assume many teenagers heard the song first because it was being played by the younger ones, which is an interesting angle to its virality; i.e. reaching your target segment via another target segment.

So again, we can see that taking time upfront to understand the problem a little deeper, understanding the target audience sowed the seeds which led to the creative concept.

Summary: what do these examples tell us?

These examples have one thing in common, that the ideas were possible because of some upfront thinking that led to the idea. That upfront thinking invariably involves several of the following:

• Understand the brand story, values, aesthetic and visual language
• Understand the back story to the company or industry problem. Why does the problem exist?
• Define who you are trying to speak to with the idea, and what you are trying to achieve
• Realise that social norms or perceived weaknesses with your brand can be flipped on their head and be strengths. Avoid following the crowd.
• Great marketing content requires lots of upfront work, it is not all just flashes of genius. Regardless of whether that last part is just good rather than brilliant, the content you make will be much more effective if you do the upfront work.

What if all I need are straightforward product shots and explainer videos?

Sometimes straightforward content is required, like product shots and explainer videos. These could be, for example, for use on your website in the conversion pathways. It might seem overkill to you to go through the whole process above if that’s all you need. Well sure but let’s look first, again, at what you are trying to achieve:

• Are you trying to bring new visitors to your site with the content?
  
  If you are trying to get people from the internet to visit your site who have never heard of you, product shots and explainer videos will only work if your product is revolutionary. Senior people in companies often see bigger differences between their products and other brand’s products than the consumer sees.
  
  Product focussed people in brands are more likely to choose to put out product shots or explainer videos than creative story-driven marketing content. If this is being targeted at completely new customers then it is almost certain this will give you a much lower uplift in brand new customers than a creative marketing concept.
  
  You have to ask yourself genuinely, in the eyes of the consumer, if your product is such a breakthrough that people would drop everything else and click through to your site to start learning about it. If not then you will need to make marketing content that tells your story if you are looking to bring in new customers.
  
• Are you looking to convert your existing stream of new site visitors to clients & customers?
  
  If you are generating traffic right now, let’s say from Google Adwords or referrals, then you are looking to convert those people. This is where detailed product shots and explainer videos are useful.
  
  However it would be really great if the buying journey can also work in some of the story, either visually, with design or with narrative. This makes your brand memorable and gives it meaning, rather than just being a functional purchase.
  
  Examples of where this can be done on the order journey:
  
  • The style of the imagery, tone-of-voice and design along the purchase journey
  • Links from the order confirmation email or page
  • Printed material with the order
  • Follow up retargeted ads and marketing with brand-story driven marketing content

Further reading

If you want read more about great brand stories then we recommend reading Contagious by Jonah Berger. Its a great read that will hopefully help you to understand more about how to tell your brand story effectively, through great marketing content and ads.