What is creativity actually for in marketing?

Knowing more does not automatically lead to a better idea

Marketing has become extraordinarily good at gathering information. We can understand categories, audiences, search behaviour, buying patterns, competitors, sentiment, conversion and almost every stage of the customer journey in more detail than ever before.

Don’t get me wrong, I would not want to make an important marketing decision without it. But there is a limit to what the evidence can do for us.

If several brands commission similar research, look at similar category data and track the same cultural trends, they are likely to uncover the same information and come to the same conclusions. Customers want convenience. They care about value. They are worried about waste. They want products that work. They like things to be easy. And to be honest, I could have told you that without any fancy-pants research.

None of those observations are wrong. The difficulty is that knowing the same things can encourage brands to make the same choices.

Data alone can lead to conformity. Creativity explores new possibilities.

That is the point where creativity becomes strategically useful.

It asks what else we might see in the evidence. Which connection has not been made yet? What happens if we frame the problem differently? What are competitors overlooking because everybody has become used to looking at the category in the same way?

The answer is not always dramatic. Sometimes the creative leap is a new product idea. Sometimes it is a different audience, a more compelling benefit, a better name, a stronger retail proposition or simply a clearer way of telling the story.

The point is that the evidence gives us something to work with. It does not remove the need for judgement, curiosity or imagination.

Creativity should start before the campaign

One of the easiest mistakes to make is to bring creativity in too late.

The strategy is agreed. The proposition is fixed. The claims have been written. The product has been developed. Then the brief reaches the creative team with a request to make all of that stand out.

Sometimes that is exactly the job. Good execution can transform how a strong proposition is noticed and understood. But sometimes the real problem is sitting further upstream.

We saw that years ago while working with LG Mobile. A new handset range represented a meaningful step forward, but there was no single breakthrough feature that could carry the story. The screens were better. The processors were faster. The memory had increased. The accurate answer would have been to list all those improvements.

Instead, the creative thought became: Demand More.

The line did not replace the evidence. It gave the evidence a shape. Rather than presenting a collection of upgraded specifications, it framed the whole range as a step forward and gave the sales story a single idea around which everything else could sit.

That is creativity doing more than execution. The important part was not finding a prettier way to present the specification table. It was finding the thought that made the separate facts mean something together.

Attention is useful. Desire is more useful

I’ve previously written about creativity being a catalyst for attention, desirability, memorability and emotional connection. I still think those are four of the most useful things creativity can contribute.

Attention is the obvious one. If nobody notices the product or the message, the rest of the marketing has very little chance to work.

But attention on its own is a fairly low bar.

You can make almost anything noticeable by being louder, stranger or more provocative than the things around it. That does not make it relevant, persuasive or useful.

The more interesting question is whether the creativity makes the offering more desirable.

People rarely buy purely because they have correctly understood the information. Understanding is the baseline. Desire is the dynamic ingredient.

That is why the way something is framed matters. A technical advantage can become a customer benefit. A functional product can acquire personality. A familiar category can suddenly feel more relevant. A product somebody had ignored can begin to look like something they want.

This is not about disguising a mediocre offer with clever marketing. Good creativity cannot manufacture lasting value where none exists. But it can reveal the value that is already there, make it easier to feel and give people a reason to care.

Memorability is not the same as novelty

Marketing people often talk about standing out. I do too. But there is a danger in treating difference as an end in itself.

Something can be unusual and still be irrelevant. It can be entertaining and still fail to say anything useful about the product. It can win attention for the creative idea while leaving the brand almost invisible.

Creativity without relevance becomes cleverness for its own sake.

The more difficult goal is to create something distinctive that also belongs to the brand and helps the message do its job.

That may involve surprise, but surprise is only useful if it opens the door to something meaningful.

This is why some of the best ideas feel obvious afterwards. Once you’ve seen them, the connection seems natural. But it was not inevitable. Somebody had to make the leap.

The skill is not simply producing something nobody has seen before. It is finding an unexpected but relevant connection that makes the product easier to notice, understand, want or remember.

Creativity is not confined to advertising

I have held this belief for some time now: marketing conversations about creativity have a habit of drifting towards advertising.

Advertising is highly visible. It is where famous ideas tend to live and where the industry hands out most of its awards. But product marketers have creative opportunities almost everywhere.

A name can change how a proposition is understood. Packaging can turn technical information into a clearer shelf decision. A promotion can express personality rather than simply offer a discount. A retail display can make a complicated category easier to navigate. A loyalty programme can turn data into something genuinely useful for the customer. A sales presentation can help a buyer see where the growth will come from.

Sometimes creativity is visual. Sometimes it is verbal. Sometimes it sits in the mechanics of the idea rather than the way it looks.

The important thing is to stop treating creativity as the bit that happens after the serious thinking has finished.

The best creative ideas often simplify

There is another misconception, creative thinking is often associated with “the big idea”, a more engaging communication style, or more theatre.

But quite often the opposite is true.

A creative solution can be an act of reduction. Find the one thought that replaces ten claims. Remove the detail that is getting in the way. Reframe the product around the problem the customer actually recognises. Turn a complicated piece of science into an image people can understand.

We see this particularly often with product brands because the people closest to the product suffer from the curse of knowledge. Put simply, they know too much. The formulation, the development story, the technical proof, the manufacturing process and every useful feature. All of those things may be true and important, but they cannot all lead. And more importantly some of them won’t ever need to be said.

Creativity helps decide what deserves the spotlight and how the supporting evidence should fall into place around it.

Simple is not the absence of thinking. Very often the opposite is true. As the famous quote goes:

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

Consistency should not become conformity

Brands also need consistency, which can sound as though it sits in tension with creativity.

A good identity system, tone of voice and set of brand principles should make a business more recognisable. They create useful boundaries and stop every new project becoming an exercise in reinvention.

But the boundaries should not force every campaign, launch or piece of content into the same shape.

I think of brand guidelines as grammar. They establish the rules that make the language recognisable. Creativity breathes life into the sentences.

If consistency becomes repetition, customers stop noticing. If creativity ignores the brand entirely, recognition disappears. The useful middle ground is enough consistency to feel unmistakably like the brand, with enough imagination to keep finding fresh ways to express it.

Creativity has to answer to the commercial problem

All of this can make creativity sound rather romantic, and I do think there is something genuinely exciting about finding an idea that changes how you see a problem.

But creative marketing still has a job to do.

If the business needs more people to notice the product, the idea should help earn attention. If customers are hesitating, it may need to reduce a barrier or make the benefit more compelling. If the category feels generic, it may need to create a clearer point of difference. If the retailer can’t see the opportunity, the idea may need to make the commercial story easier to grasp.

That is why I have never found ‘creative for its own sake’ particularly useful.

The test is not whether the work is clever. It is whether the creativity makes the marketing more effective.

Sometimes that means doing something bold. Sometimes it means finding a beautifully simple expression of the obvious thing everybody else has somehow failed to say.

Creativity is becoming more valuable, not less

There is an interesting tension in marketing now.

We have more data, more automation, more templates and more tools capable of producing competent work quickly. That is useful. It also means competence itself is becoming easier to reproduce.

The risk isn’t that these things inherently make marketing bad. But that more of it becomes perfectly acceptable and increasingly interchangeable.

If everyone can access similar information, use similar tools and optimise towards similar measures, distinctiveness does not arrive automatically.

That makes creative judgement more important. Not because human beings possess some mystical spark that technology can never touch. I don’t think we need that argument.

The value lies in curiosity, interpretation, taste, lived experience and the willingness to make a choice that is not simply the statistically safest version of what everybody else is doing.

Tools can broaden what is possible. They can speed up exploration, production and iteration. But somebody still has to decide which possibility is worth pursuing and why.

So what is creativity actually for?

For me, creativity is not a department and it is not a finishing touch.

It is a way of finding more interesting and effective answers to marketing problems.

It can make a brand easier to notice, a product more desirable, a message easier to remember and a complicated proposition easier to understand. It can create emotional connection, but it can also create commercial clarity. It can live in a campaign, but it can just as easily live in the positioning, the packaging, the promotion, the product story or the way a retailer presents the category.

Research gives us a better understanding of the world as it is. Strategy helps us decide where we want to go. Creativity helps us imagine routes that were not obvious when we started.

That is why I think it deserves to be involved much earlier than the execution.

Because the most valuable creative contribution can help us find a better answer in the first place.