How can marketers unlock creative excellence?

Their responses identified a strong belief in the power of creativity and distinctiveness, but also thoughts around what enables organisations to be creative and how it can earn its place at the business table.

For many marketers, creativity is what inspires them to do their best work not just when it comes to communication but across the function. “Often as marketers, we would think about creativity for the lens of our communication campaigns. I encourage and invite our marketers and business leaders to think about creativity in a broader sense. Creativity is what fuels our thinking, how to serve our consumers, how to create partnerships with our customers to really generate an insane value for our consumers, and what makes sense in the way how we use different tools, embrace creativity in its broader sense,” said Veronika Kryuchkova, Global Head of Capability Building at The Reckitt Marketing Academy.

That view is echoed by Alberto Hernandez, Chief Growth Officer at Opella: “In reality, creative thinking goes far beyond a brief to an agency or a 30 second campaign or a long form video. It actually goes into how do you apply original thinking into problem solving. So, I think the moment that you elevate what creativity means, basically, you can apply it in all fields, and I think that's the point that we have to make as marketers.”

Anouck Bizien-Mourgue, Global Head of L’Oréal University for Augmented Marketing & Communications, says the importance of creativity cannot be underestimated. “In a fragmented world, in an oversaturated messages world, you know, creativity is a way for brand to thrive, so we need, you know, our marketers to create the unexpected, to create unparalleled consumer experience, and the beauty of that is where your human added value really shines, and for sure you can augment some of the process with AI, but at the end of the day, it's really about your human skills that are going to play a role there,” she says.

Earning recognition for its value

Accepting that creativity is part of the essence of marketing, it also needs to earn its place at the table. “Despite the fact creativity is abstract, you can still try to measure it using different application, objective and subjective, so you can explain to your organisation that is critical and important,” says Dmytro Pylypenko, Global Head of Marketing Excellence and Transformation at Carlsberg Group. “There are some different examples you can use: MMM models, you can use the number of awards simply, or you can use subjective analysis and your creative score within the organisation.”

Building great creative however, doesn’t just come out of the blue, it requires an infrastructure and consumer insight is a big part of that.

“The biggest unlock is to identify deep-rooted consumer insight, consumer tensions, which were not tapped into. Once you identify them and connect up with a powerful idea, you have a huge opportunity to bring to life,” says Rafael Narvaez, Global CMO at Mutti.

“You can be very creative, but if you don't have good consumer insights, then it will take you to be creativity for the sake of creativity,” agreed Taide Guajardo, Chief Brand Officer P&G Europe.

Culture that allows for creativity

Others argue that the context and culture are what matter when it comes to knowing what aspect of creativity is best coming from technology or human teams.

Getting that balance right requires an organisational culture that allows for creativity. “I think these days more than ever we need to dial up our curiosity and empathy. Today is a complex world. The teams are looking for guidance and looking for room and an atmosphere, a culture that enables them to learn, iterate, make some mistakes, and then move on with the learning process. So creating a culture with curiosity, learning and empathy is probably the best way to go about it,” Gulen Bengi, Lead CMO Mars & Chief Growth Officer, Mars Snacking.