When we determine the strategy for the product or brand of an enterprise, it is followed by putting forward ideas according to this strategy. How can we produce a suitable and explosive idea?
The first step is to collect elements: creativity is composed of many scattered elements, which are embodied in comprehensive elements, professional elements and product elements. As for what we leave or abandon in the creative process, it is related to the proposed strategy and users.
Comprehensive elements can be regarded as the basis for marketers to play their creativity. It is a collection of social science, logical thinking and all kinds of knowledge. For example, we want to do event marketing for a new product, and brand users like trends and novel content. In the process of creative thinking, if you collect many elements, including what can represent the trend, pop music, trendy electronics, or skateboarding teenagers, etc. There are many ways of logical thinking, such as comparative thinking, causal thinking, recursive thinking and reverse thinking. This is a personal habit and can be learned and mastered. Personally, I prefer to use comparison method, which is often used when collecting elements at first. Here, it reminds me of a short story, which is a classic case of using comparative thinking. There is an adhesive shop in Hong Kong. When a new type of "powerful all-purpose adhesive" was introduced, various "all-purpose adhesives" appeared on the market. The boss decided to start with advertisements. After his research, he found that almost all the advertisements of "all-purpose glue" are similar. So, he came up with an ingenious and ingenious "advertisement", sticking a gold coin worth 1000 yuan on the wall in front of the store, announcing that whoever can dig it down with his hand will give it to him. Sure enough, this advertisement attracted many people's attempts and onlookers, and played a "sensational" effect. Although no one can dig gold coins by hand, more and more people are buying "powerful all-purpose glue".
In addition, the professional elements are general marketing knowledge, advertising knowledge and association methods. For example, we are creative for an e-commerce double eleven promotion. In this respect, it is necessary to understand the professional knowledge, product characteristics, logistics capabilities and service processes of e-commerce promotion. At the same time, some marketing and advertising rules can not be ignored. What kind of advertisements can be placed, and what kind of publicity content does not involve illegality. These may become important elements of your creativity.
Finally, talk about the product elements. Starting from the product, consider the marketing objectives, selling points, consumption target groups, support points and value associations of the product, just like the difference between this cup of coffee and another cup of coffee? How to accurately describe a taxi driver in order to find him accurately? This is the way to collect elements, and it is also the primary task to train us to be creative people.
The second step is element association: sorting, researching and arranging the collected elements, and trying to make new combinations. It can be said that it is useless to put knowledge there. If you don't put what you have learned into practice, you can't reflect a person's value, and so can marketing and creativity. Systematic knowledge should be combined with things, and this combination will bring new discoveries.
We take e-commerce as an example. Before the Double Eleven, we collected several kinds of product promotion schemes, and competing products also launched gimmicks such as 0 yuan and gifts, and many singles held blind date activities on Singles' Day. This e-commerce company has always taken the lowest price as the propaganda point, and the logistics link is very good. Where do single people like to date, what do they like to use, Mo Mo, WeChat ... How do some elements combine? How to connect?
There are several principles of association here, such as proximity, contingency and inevitability. In the creative storm, all creative elements can be written on the whiteboard to discuss the combination, or they can be grouped and related, and finally they can tell their own related results respectively.
The third step, creative incubation: this link becomes rich and interesting. When we discuss many related results one by one, we can optimize them by deleting the content that is not excellent enough, even an element in the creativity. This is a process of digestion, in which you may spell out a good idea.
The fourth step, creativity flashes: We often gush out a good idea and even shout excitedly, which makes us feel suddenly enlightened. So is creativity. When we found that we had passed the first three links, we were brewing again and then broke out instantly. Sometimes the small universe just has an uncontrollable feeling. We can complete the accumulation of creativity through the first three links or the accumulation of individuals and teams in daily life, and will be stimulated to produce new ones in brainstorming. Let's take the e-commerce double eleven promotion to see the event chain of our new combination:
Creativity is like telling a story and designing different plots. Maybe this series of events happened on Singles Day. A single person on WeChat was ready to join the "Naked Action" that day. He started dating, and at the same time, he found that he lacked the necessities of dating and began to prepare for shopping. At this time, he saw the promotion information of necessities. Wow! The result is an unprecedented low price. After placing the order, the second delivery service solved the embarrassment of lack of necessities at night!
Among various elements, we have found a plot that can be interrelated, which should be the source of creativity. When we fill in the contents of each link, it becomes an idea.
The fifth step, creative carving: In this process, an idea is put into practice. Sometimes this idea can be very unconstrained, but many factors need to be considered in the end. First, creativity must meet the actual needs of products, marketing objectives and so on, and also consider marketing budget, production cost, process cycle and so on. , followed by enforceability. Is it difficult to implement the idea after it is put forward? One more thing, the formation of creativity should conform to the characteristics of socialized people, such as fun. Finally, don't forget to reflect the marketing information in the creative display.
What was the idea of the last e-commerce double eleven?
20 12 double eleven, we served an e-commerce company and launched a durex 1 1 yuan snap in its products, which was exclusively presented to WeChat users. This promotion has attracted attention in WeChat and Weibo, and the dissemination of copywriting content is naturally attractive. When it began to spread, the order was generated within ten minutes.
Creativity, as the highlight of marketing and the life of advertising, has experienced a process of creative production through the above five steps. The attraction of creativity-relevance, the original driving force of creativity-interest, the raw material of creativity-element, the expression form of creativity-combination, and the street presentation of creativity-sculpture. The answer is yes, as long as we do it with our heart. Mr Lai Shengchuan said, "Everyone is creative. Creativity is not the patent of genius. Creativity is cultivated. "
In digital marketing activities, it is creativity that locks users and puts forward strategies. In this respect, it can no longer follow the rules, but it can be subverted. After "my friends and I are shocked", we will have a cognition and recognition of the brand and products. Creativity is to make marketing events and activities shine in the eyes of target participants and even attract them. In this regard, the efforts of creative people are needed.
Let's talk about the difference between creative people and ordinary people. Simply put, it is irrelevant. Ordinary people see everything, just isolated knowledge points and islands, and can't find the relevance of things. Creative people regard it as a link in the whole knowledge chain in everything, and they can be interrelated, such as tigers, leaves and white clouds. These three keywords seem to have nothing to do, but we can relate them in many ways: comparison, time, exaggeration, metaphor, size, proportion, locality, repetition, omission, grafting and story. ...
With creative methods, you can display your skills in actual marketing, which will be deeply felt by friends who work in Party B. Many times, you will participate in various competitive seminars to fight for resources, team, strategy and price, and it is also important to fight for creativity. In the process of bidding for a few minutes, is your logic clear, is your creativity novel and distinctive enough, and have you captured the hearts of bidders? As Party A, we also attach great importance to creativity. In all kinds of marketing bidding, the goal of improving brand awareness, market share and sales volume is the most common, so a good idea can at least have a chance to achieve this goal under the right strategy.
We are well aware of the importance of creativity, which may bring us many unexpected things, but in the process of creating creativity, there are some principles worthy of our attention:
1, we need to find out the core of creativity simply and directly: some unimportant information and elements need to be eliminated, especially in the process of creativity, just like incubation and carving in the "five-step method".
2. Break away from convention and let creativity have unexpected surprises: If we think about creativity according to people's normal way of thinking, it will become boring, or it will not arouse others' enthusiasm for participation at all, then creativity will fail. If we need to stimulate users' interest in creativity, it needs to be different and subversive, just like our living environment. When we stay there for a long time and become a habit, there will be no freshness. When one day we changed the position of furniture, so did the creativity in marketing promotion.
3. Creativity should be grounded: when we go from strategy implementation to creativity, more abstract concepts and models have become concrete forms of expression, and creativity needs to be understood, remembered and grounded!
4. Credible ideas make the brand more reliable: Why do others believe the marketing events you do? It's really not easy to convince others now. What's more, the new legal nature of online rumors and all kinds of unreliable hype have obviously been shot, and credibility has become a principle of creativity, which requires us to strictly control the element collection stage, the credibility of various elements needs to be considered, and the practical details in the creative chain need to be carefully scrutinized, so that the generated creativity will be more credible!
5, into a little emotion, creativity is more full: let others care more about our creativity. There is such a case. 1925, John Caples wants to write a title for an advertisement, which is an advertisement for the American Conservatory of Music to promote music correspondence courses. After that, he wrote a catchy slogan: "When I sat in front of the piano, they all laughed at me, but when I started playing …" This title successfully popularized correspondence courses and became a buzzword in the advertising industry. Later, Larry Zeit asked Caples why he emphasized social interests, not just the advantages of selling courses. John Capuleus replied, "You don't understand that it is difficult to learn the piano. You can't use this as a selling point, but you can sell the idea of social success and overcoming any defects in order to become so fulfilling. "
6. Talk about creativity like a story: stories are very powerful. Many people are willing to listen to some stories, but they don't want to read the old instructions and rules. However, in the creative process, we can find inspiring stories, and our ideas can be told like stories, from which users can find their own relevance and inspire users to take action.
7. Don't be complacent about an idea: when we find an idea, we will be very excited, but in actual combat, we often can't just hold one idea, but we can increase it to two or three. However, other ideas are also well-crafted, so that we can't even weigh which one is the best. At this time, you will be surprised to find that doing so will make you think about things you have never thought of before, and you will certainly find new land.
The above principles are very helpful to our creativity, and we will avoid taking some detours. Finally, I recommend some tools to those who have been studying and suffer from lack of creativity.
The first is brainstorming: it is much stronger to pool everyone's wisdom in a short time and solve problems in a team than in an individual. Brainstorming has four main points: seeking quantity, not criticizing, being brief and asking everyone. Some tools and methods are also used when brainstorming leads to creativity, such as questioning, decision tree, attribute classification, forced sorting, post-it notes and so on.
The other is mind map: it is an effective way of thinking, which is applied to the thinking "map" of memory, learning and thinking, and is conducive to the divergent thinking of the human brain. Mind mapping is a method to concretize radioactive thinking, which has many benefits for us to collect and combine elements. How to use it is not described here. Interested friends can join a special mind map community to study or buy corresponding books.
After so many years of marketing promotion, I spent most of my time dealing with creativity. I am very willing to collect all kinds of elements. I have formed a habit at ordinary times. I will put together some similar information, pictures and other materials, and shoot at will when I see good outdoor advertisements. Some are electronic, and some are from newspapers and magazines. No matter what kind of media, we will collect these raw materials in short. When we want to do marketing planning for a product, creativity will come into being, which takes some time to accumulate. In addition to the process of personal accumulation, the steps, principles and tools mentioned here are practical training for creativity. When we are sharpening our knives and going forward bravely, the war is just around the corner and all the systematic preparations have begun. All parties are gearing up and using creativity to win by surprise. This time, we have made great contributions!