Creative isn’t the look and feel. It’s what makes marketing work.

Creative isn’t the look and feel. It’s how communication lands.

Creative, in the way I mean it, is the thinking that makes someone pause for half a second longer. It’s the difference between “I’ve seen this sort of thing a thousand times” and “hang on… what’s that?” It can be a line, a visual idea, a twist, a tone of voice, a format choice. Sometimes it’s just the confidence to boldly say one thing instead of ten things vaguely.

Creative isn’t just something that happens in adverts. It runs through every place your brand communicates. The pack, the website, the email, the product page, the sales deck, the few seconds you’ve got to make someone care. If it’s treated as a finishing touch, you miss the chance to make the brand feel distinctive and alive.

My daughter has recently ditched the dairy and started using oat milk, so this example resonates with me. Look at how Oatly writes on a carton. It’s not trying to be a witty one liner. It’s a whole tone, that’s self-aware, slightly awkward, and un-corporate. That’s creative. It’s the decision to talk like a person who doesn’t take themselves too seriously, and to do it everywhere. No single piece is “viral”, but together it’s unmistakable.

Brand personality isn’t the creative, but it’s what stops your ideas drifting into “this could be anyone”.

Which brings us neatly to the bit people often skip: what “creative” actually means.

A quick note on wording. When I say “creative”, I mean the work itself: the idea and the execution people actually see. When I say “creativity”, I mean the thinking that gets you there, the habit of finding original, appropriate ways to communicate. One is the output. The other is the capability.

A simple definition: originality + appropriateness

There’s a lazy version of creativity that says: “We need to stand out, so we need to be more creative.” And yes, standing out matters. But standing out without purpose is how you end up with something that gets a reaction and still does nothing for the brand.

A definition I like because it’s both simple and useful is this: creative is originality plus appropriateness. In other words, it has to be different enough to earn attention, and it has to be relevant enough to do the job.

Originality is the bit people get excited about. It’s the surprise. The twist. The unexpected combination. Often the best ideas come from two things that don’t normally belong together suddenly clicking into place.

Appropriateness is the grown-up bit (it’s where the commercial realities lie). Where you ask: is this right for the audience, and is it right for the brand? Does it feel like something we would do, in a way that builds recognition over time? Or is it a one-off stunt that could belong to anyone?

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can make something brilliant, funny, entertaining, even “viral”, and still not build the brand, if the attention doesn’t attach to anything you own. That’s where “more creative” turns into eccentricity. You make noise, but you don’t get recognition.

Appropriateness is also what keeps you out of the subjectivity swamp. People will always have opinions. Someone will always prefer the other route. But if you can agree what the work needs to do, who it’s for, and what brand it needs to feel like, you’ve got a proper way to judge it. Not “do I like it?”, but “does it land, and does it land as us?”

A common mistake: message-led work that isn’t brand-led (or audience-led)

This is the bit I see all the time, especially in smaller brands.

Sales are struggling. Someone (quite reasonably) says, “We just need a better message.” So you try a new angle. Then another. Then another. You change the headline, you change the promise, you change the whole story, and each time you hope this one will be the one that finally breaks through.

The problem is, if the creative is only built around the message of the month, and it isn’t rooted in the brand or the audience, it doesn’t really have a chance. It won’t resonate because it is not speaking to anything real. It can start to feel inauthentic. It won’t cut through because it feels like noise. And it won’t create a positive emotional response because people can sense when something is trying a bit too hard.

There’s also a quieter cost: you never build recognition. Every month you effectively start again. New angle, new tone, new visual approach, new everything. Even if the work is “good”, it’s rarely yours. It could belong to anyone. Which means any attention you do win has nowhere to stick.

Without a clear brand personality to play off, you end up changing the message, the tone, and the creative approach, and you miss out on the compound effect.

Cadbury’s gorilla is a good reminder of what that looks like when it’s done well. It isn’t a product demo. It’s not crammed with reasons to buy. It is a piece of communication that prioritises emotion, intrigue, and joy. And crucially, that emotion makes sense for the brand and the product. It feels like a world Cadbury would live in, which is why it stuck.

So yes, refresh is healthy. You can change executions, formats, even the way you tell the story. But if you keep changing the underlying idea of who you are and why someone should care, you’re not improving marketing, you’re just reinventing the wheel.

And the next question is: what does creative actually do when it works? More often than not, it can make people feel something.

What creative actually does when it works

A lot of people talk about creativity as if the goal is “being remembered”. Sometimes it is. But the more useful way to think about it is this: creative changes how people respond. And this isn’t just a creative director blowing his own trumpet, across large effectiveness studies, creative quality consistently comes out as one of the biggest drivers of whether campaigns work.

When it works, it makes someone feel something first, and that feeling changes what happens next. For example, interest buys you a few more seconds. Surprise breaks the doomscrolling or autopilot. Intrigue keeps you watching. Delight lowers your defences. In that moment, the message has a chance of landing properly, instead of being skimmed and binned like everything else.

This is also why I get twitchy when creative is treated as a luxury. When budgets are tight, you cannot afford to pay for attention twice. You need work that does more than “communicate the point”. You need work that makes people pause long enough to take it in.

It also explains why emotionally engaging marketing tends to outperform the stuff that just lists reasons to buy. Not because everyone needs to make people cry, but because emotion is what turns a message into something that feels worth noticing. It gives the communication energy. It creates a reaction. It makes it easier to remember, and easier to repeat.

There’s a catch, though, and it’s a big one: emotion on its own isn’t the win. Emotion has to attach to the brand. If the work creates a reaction but that reaction could have come from any competitor, you’ve made something entertaining, not something that builds your brand.

So the question becomes less “is it clever?” and more “is it doing the job?” Is it earning attention, creating a feeling, and making that feeling unmistakably you?

Creative should run through the whole marketing system

It’s tempting to talk about creative as if it lives in adverts, and all the other touchpoints are just “supporting assets”. In reality, consumers don’t experience brands through a single big campaign. They experience it in bits. A glance at a pack. A product page skim-read on a phone. An advert on the tube. An email that gets opened but ignored. A social post that gets scrolled past in half a second.

That’s why creative is not a department. It’s how the brand behaves across all of those touchpoints.

And yes, design still matters. It’s the craft that makes the brand cues consistent. Great ideas fail all the time because the execution is messy, generic, or looks like it belongs to the category rather than the brand.

If your brand personality is clear, it becomes a springboard. It gives you a tone of voice, a point of view, and a set of cues you can keep coming back to. Then creative takes that raw material and turns it into work that feels engaging, coherent, and unmistakably yours. Not because you’ve repeated the same line everywhere, but because the brand has a consistent way of behaving.

This matters because in most categories, you’re not competing against a single rival. You’re competing against sameness. The consumer products world is full of brands that look “nice”, sound “confident”, and make broadly similar claims. If you don’t have a recognisable way of communicating, your marketing becomes a series of one-off attempts to grab attention, and each attempt starts from a blank page.

The practical implication is simple: if you want your communications to work harder, you don’t only need stronger advertising. You need creativity threaded through the whole system. Packaging that feels like the brand, not just the category. Product pages that don’t read like everyone else’s. Email and social that feel like they came from a real point of view. Sales tools that explain the story in a way a retailer or partner can repeat without translating it.

When this is done properly, it makes a brand feel bigger than its budget. Not by shouting louder, but by being more recognisable wherever people meet it.

A practical way to judge creative

If creative is going to be more than a debate about personal taste, it needs a few simple tests. Not a giant framework. Just something you can come back to when the room starts drifting into, “I like it / I don’t like it”.

Here are three questions I find useful.

1) Could this belong to anyone?
If you can swap the logo and nothing really breaks, it’s not owned enough. That’s usually the clue that the work is leaning on generic category signals, not distinctive brand cues. It might still look good, but it won’t build recognition.

2) Is it relevant to a real person, in a real moment?
Not a vague “target audience” slide. A real situation. A real tension. A real job-to-be-done. If the work doesn’t connect to something people genuinely care about, it won’t create the kind of reaction that makes them stop, listen, or remember.

3) Can you stick with it long enough for it to work?
This is the one most brands struggle with. They change the message, the tone, and the creative approach before anything has had a chance to compound. Consistency is not boring. Consistency is how recognition gets built. You can refresh executions, but if you keep changing the underlying idea, you’re back to zero every time.

If you can answer those three well, you’re in a much better place. Then you can ask the more interesting question: what emotion are we going for here? Surprise, intrigue, delight, reassurance, warmth. There are lots of routes in. The point is that the emotion has a job to do, and it has to attach back to the brand.

A closing challenge

If you’re a smaller brand and sales aren’t where they need to be, you don’t need “more marketing”. You need marketing that works harder.

So, here’s the challenge: stop treating creative as the glossy wrapper and stop chasing a new message every month. Get clear on the personality of the brand, decide what you want to be known for, and build creative that is original, relevant, and unmistakably you. Then give it long enough to start doing its job.

Because the most expensive thing you can do with a tight budget is keep starting again.