What Is Creative Strategy?

Creative strategy is one of those terms that can mean slightly different things depending on who you ask.

Asana defines it pretty specifically through a marketing lens: “A creative strategy is a plan that guides how your company communicates its message to achieve specific goals.”

Chris Bilton and Stephen Cummings take a broader view in Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation. Their work looks at what happens when creative and strategic thinking are brought together across an enterprise, not just within the marketing department.

William Duggan approaches it from another angle in Creative Strategy: A Guide for Innovation. His methodology looks at how we can break apart problems, study what has worked before and combine those precedents in new ways to arrive at a solution.

All three are getting at slightly different applications of the same idea.

Through my career, and across the different kinds of brands and problems I’ve worked with, I’ve come to think about it pretty simply:

Creative strategy is taking a creative process and applying it to planning in order to develop a solution that strategically solves a problem.

The important part for me is that creative strategy isn’t another strategy competing with brand strategy, marketing strategy, product strategy or whatever else might already exist inside an organization.

It’s an approach you can use within all of them.

Brand strategy, for example, establishes a durable direction for a brand. Creative strategy can help you build that strategy, but you can also use the same approach tomorrow to solve a customer experience problem, rethink an event, develop a partnership, improve an internal process or figure out why a product isn’t connecting.

That portability is part of what makes it valuable.

You’ve Already Seen It Work

Snickers is an easy example.

The brand needed a stronger idea that could connect with customers and work consistently across markets. The creative strategy found a simple human truth at the center of the problem: hunger changes how people behave.

That gave the brand a direction. Instead of starting with another ad about chocolate, the idea became “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.”

That one strategic thought created a platform capable of producing years of different creative ideas around the world while staying connected to the same customer insight. More importantly, it worked. The campaign went on to deliver measurable sales and market-share growth and is still being used and adapted today.

Spotify Wrapped gets there differently.

Spotify had years of incredibly personal listening data. The opportunity was figuring out how to turn data (that mostly lived behind the scenes) into something customers would actually care about.

The creative move was to make the customer the subject.

Wrapped turns your own listening behavior into a personalized story about your year. It gives you something you genuinely want to see and, apparently, something a lot of people want everyone else to see too.

You probably look at yours. You definitely see everyone else’s. You might even complain about seeing everyone else’s. But that’s also part of why it cuts through.

In both cases, the recognizable idea is the end result. The creative strategy is the thinking that connects the problem, the customer and the eventual innovative solution.

Tapping into Creative Strategy

For me, creative strategy starts with questions.

If someone brings me a problem, I don’t want to immediately start throwing ideas at it. I want to understand what’s actually going on.

Who does this matter to? Why does it matter now? What do we already know? What don’t we know? Who would feel the biggest difference if we got it right? What change are we actually trying to create?

I like to spend a lot of time interrogating the problem.

One question I often ask: What pisses you off the most about this problem?

People get good at explaining problems in professional language, but that is rarely helpful. They give you the brief, the business objective, the KPI or whatever version of the problem has made its way into the meeting.

Asking what you can’t stand about it tends to gets closer to the actual pain we need to solve for. The thing you genuinely want to change.

From there, I want to understand the envisioned outcome.

If we actually solved this, what would be happening differently? What would change for the customer? What would change inside the organization? What would success look like? Maybe more importantly, what would it feel like?

If we can’t articulate what we want the future to look like, we will likely fail in creating it.

Getting Creative

Once you understand the problem, you can start getting creative.

This is where brainstorming, creative exercises, research, references, precedents and all the other tools become useful.

The difference is that now they have somewhere to go.

You aren’t generating ideas because it’s time for the brainstorm. You’re exploring different ways to get from a problem you now understand to the version of success you’ve actually taken the time to define.

Outcomes & Expectations

There often isn’t one standard creative strategy deliverable.

Sometimes you need a brief, sometimes you need a strategic direction, maybe a set of principles or a few creative territories with guardrails. Sometimes the most valuable outcome is simply getting your team aligned around the problem they’re actually trying to solve.

The format can change and should change to match the project. However, I find that clarity and momentum are regularly the outcomes of good creative strategy.

Clarity means people understand the problem, what success looks like and why they’re headed in a particular direction.

Momentum is what happens when that clarity starts changing the way people behave.

Decisions get easier. Meetings get better. Folks know what they own. And, you need fewer people involved in every decision because there’s more trust in the direction.

Most noticeably, you’ll find that people start wanting to push the idea forward without being asked.

A project that felt daunting starts to feel interesting. It gets thought about more than just in meetings. Your team texts you about it after hours. They start wanting to tell others about what they’re working on.

It shifts from getting a task done to pursuing something the team actually wants to pull off.

A Foundation to Learn From

There’s another part of creative strategy that I think matters even when the eventual result isn’t what you hoped for.

It gives you confidence in how you got there.

You can look back and say: we understood the problem, we knew what we were trying to change, we made these decisions for specific reasons, and this is what happened.

Maybe it crushed. Maybe it didn’t.

Either way, you have a vetted foundation to learn from.

Without that thinking in the middle, the exact same result can leave you wondering whether you made good decisions or just got lucky.

To me, that’s a big part of the value. Creative strategy doesn’t guarantee the answer. It gives you a better way to arrive at one.