What is the point of a creative concept?

Building a brand requires a well thought-out platform and clear guidelines on what the communication should convey. But when people generally talk about advertising, this is rarely what they mean. What is seen and heard is the creative concept, the ultimate consequence of the brand platform and what will help the company cut through the noise.

What is a creative concept?

Creativity is the foundation of all successful communication. It brings products and services to life and ensures they are relevant, engaging and desirable. Simply put, creative advertising creates a stronger connection between the brand and the target audience. The aim of the creative concept is therefore to create what is commonly referred to as 'The Big Idea', the fundamental communicative idea that makes the message distinctive and easy to both notice and remember.

The Big Idea must be original and dramatize the selling points. Humor, drama or action are often ingredients of a creative concept depending on what you want to communicate. The Big Idea is simply the bridge between strategy and tactics, between gathering facts to creating words and images.

A creative concept can be defined as the description of the basic communicative idea and reasoning behind it and provides the framework for how you design the communication in terms of image, text, colors and proportions. It is the story that ties the different design elements together and creates a memorable and effective message that triggers the desired behavioral response from the target audience.

What a creative concept is not

A creative concept is not an advertising campaign. It is a general description of the idea, a rough draft describing the Big Idea and sketchy examples of how it can be executed to show that it can be developed over time. A creative concept is not the finished ad, movie, banner or poster. It does not need to contain the right fonts, the right photos or sharp, pre-formulated messages. The focus is solely on the underlying communicative idea.

A creative concept is also not a creative idea. The difference between a creative idea and a creative concept is that the idea is about solving a specific design or messaging problem. A concept is much more developed, bringing together a variety of creative ideas into a strong overall message. Every creative concept starts with a creative idea, but once developed, it becomes complex, subtle and interesting enough to be experienced again and again. And it is precisely this complexity that makes it complicated. Coming up with a single creative idea is rarely difficult. The challenge is to find one that is so strong that it can carry an entire creative concept, that it can be applied to all aspects of the company's products and services for a long time.

Is it worth investing in a creative concept?

Because a creative concept should last quite a long time, it takes time to create. After all, it's not just an idea that needs to emerge, it's The Big Idea. Which is rarely the first one that pops up. And it takes a lot of research and audience analysis to ensure that the concept really meets the target audience at their level and makes them feel the right things. So is it worth it?

Yes, today the research in this area is quite unanimous. Creativity means increased advertising impact based on several different parameters. A study by Harvard Business Review showed that a Euro invested in a highly creative ad campaign had on average almost twice the impact on sales than a Euro invested in a non-creative ad campaign.

A well-developed creative concept can also help brands to increase customer loyalty and the perceived quality of the offer. A study by Micael Dahlen, Sara Rosengren and Fredrik Torn, published in the Journal of Advertising Research, shows that people perceive a brand to be of high quality and worthy of their attention simply because they are impressed by the effort put into developing a creative campaign. And author James Hurman, in his book The Case for Creativity, has shown, among other things, that creative ads deliver 11 times the ROI of non-creative ad campaigns.

Finally, we can also conclude that people generally do not put much effort into absorbing the message of advertising. For example, a study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that only 16% of people could both remember the ad and link it to the right sender. This means that 84% of the advertising budget was wasted. With this in mind, there are good reasons to invest in a creative concept rather than settling for seemingly 'safe' rational advertising.