By Judy Browne and Tim Hollins from Headmint (first published by ADMAP in November 2007)

As today's consumers cease to become the passive recipients of brand messages, it is becoming increasingly crucial that brand custodians can ignite and exploit the explosion of the ideas which develop from brand ‘co-creation'.

Brands are the simply the sum of the experiences that people have with them. To make these experiences consistently count as good ones, brand-orientated companies need to engage more of their own organization in the creative process, beyond the creative and marketing people. In a world where numerous studies show increasing brand commoditisation, increasingly similar advertising and the real need to engage people, not simply interrupt them, there has never been a greater business need for creativity - at the business, brand and communications level. Creativity needs to work in more places, more often.

Brands: a process not a task

A living brand is a pattern of behaviour, not a veneer applied on the outside by creative communication partners. Just as people can change their clothes without changing their characters, so can brands. It is no longer for brand custodians just to manage the ‘look and feel' of the brand, but to cultivate its true, consistent character. So great brands must now be the process of internal cultivation not just a marketing department task. This requires a different creative way of working.

Here, we explore some of the ways that brand custodians can work with brand ‘co-creation', in collaborative idea development, a process designed for those who wish to cultivate, rather than just ‘administrate' their brand or brands. In it we will highlight some of the most common barriers to organizational brand creativity and describe some strategies for brand custodians to apply - methodologies that help people to help themselves. We need to understand what truly creative brand ideas are, and why they are of critical importance, before addressing some of the common barriers that, in our experience, prevent organizations from delivering creative brand relationships.

Great brands are not all logic

There has to be ‘magical rationality'. In any long-run scrutiny of outstanding brands, the elements of the brand DNA, its unique combination of components which provide distinctiveness and real value, are without exception, intangible and more often than not quite elusive - closer to magic than logic. That's why it is rumoured that Richard Branson refuses to write a detailed description of the Virgin brand - he wants to keep the magic!

For many businesses, this issue - logic versus magic - sits at the heart of the brand creativity problem. In most companies, logic (strategy) is separated from magic (creativity) by a wide gap. In the blue corner are the strategic thinkers, who would describe themselves as analytical, logical, numerical, verbal, and linear. In the red corner are the creative thinkers who are intuitive, spatial, emotional, and physical. That's why so many companies have problems cultivating creativity into their brands: because strategy is a left-brain activity and creativity is right-brain.

What is a creative brand idea?

A creative brand idea affects, directs and challenges the whole of the business. Often the best ideas don't really seem that clever. Some even seem obvious. But they are new. Great brand ideas are valuable. Great brand ideas are realized; they show up everywhere.  Consider a huge global business like Nike. Phil Knight the founder, once told the Harvard Business Review that his brand idea was ‘justified irreverence', an idea dripping with magic not logic. You can see it in the shoes, the athletes and the ads, even the sporting ideas Nike invents. It's everywhere.

Great brand ideas can come from anywhere

Although you may never be able to control fully the consistent reproduction of great brand ideas, the chances of them occurring can be increased.  Great ideas need help to be born.

One of the most sure-fire ways of achieving this is to ensure that the brand is focused on by diverse, cross-functional groups.  An array of functional disciplines and also cultures (both organizational and ethnic) and ages have a greater chance of coming up with unique ideas.

It's not easy, because it is tempting, when putting together a team to crack a brand issue or problem, to select team members who think like you. Chances are your team will get along really well and get a lot done. But will the ideas be truly innovative? Probably not, because the participants will come to the problem with the same mind-set and they will leave with it. This is underlined by Robert Sutton in his book ‘Weird Ideas that Work: How to build a creative company'. One of his top suggestions is to employ people who make you uncomfortable.

But you need to help them to be different...

Hanging out with people who think just like you, makes life a whole lot easier, and it is true that bringing people together just because they are different, have diverse attitudes or make each other uncomfortable is not the same as putting together a truly inventive team. Warren Bennis and Patricia Biederman, in trying to understand how some of America's most pioneering, resourceful teams cooperated and collaborated their way to success, undertook an analysis of the blend of individual and collective genius to create something new and exceptional. Just like cracking a gene code, or launching into space exploration, building a world-class brand cannot be accomplished by one person, however exceptional they might be. There are two many issues to be identified, too many connections to be made. The investigation spanned seven truly pioneering teams, from Apple and the Presidential election team that put Bill Clinton into office, through to the Disney studio. The commonality was that all of the teams produced work that was enduring - or as Steve Jobs said ‘put a dent on the universe'.

We use an exercise called Great Creative Groups, developed by Headmint, to allow diverse brand teams to audit their own creative abilities. Using a ranking framework against the twelve characteristics that Bennis discovered to be common to these remarkable teams, brand teams can identify and then work on the gaps to become collectively more creative as a team.

Understand the unexpressed

Working with brand teams across the globe on becoming more creative with their brands, Headmint has uncovered some important lessons. The first, and often most creative leap, is that brand creativity comes from combining elements of brand DNA in an unusual fashion.

The second lesson is that it is difficult to trace the origin of an insight. Ask an innovator where their groundbreaking idea came from and the answer will invariably be ‘out of nowhere'. In other words, it's messy: creativity is a combination of concepts, and it is random.

Many subjects that marketing and brand-building must examine and clarify are complicated, multi-faceted and highly subjective: brand values, consumer motivations, market segments, cultural contexts.

So we developed a technique that can help us explain and account for such things as core brand truth and marketplace insight, at one and the same time. 'Suns and Satellites' is a hierarchical model which is used to elicit core values and secondary characteristics, which can be used to create a simple (but not simplistic) graphic ‘map' of your brand and unearth possible unique creative DNA combinations.

In this exercise we ask teams to consider the widest range of associations for their brand. Not just the ‘hard' tangible aspects, but also the less tangible ‘soft' associations such as emotions, attitudes, values, feelings, colours, sounds, memories, sensations, shapes etc. Then start clustering these associations together. Often the subject matter is not just the brand but the context that it exists in, the territory where critical insight can appear. 

Our experience of working with countless brand teams in many categories, has shown that when combining elements of a brand's DNA, the more far-flung and independent, the more creative the new solution. In other words, if the components combined are very different, the new idea will be correspondingly more creative. Truly creative brand ideas are groundbreaking, because the elements of DNA are so unexpected and the combinations so atypical, they are true juxtapositions. New combinations of the critical elements don't always lead to brand magic, but sometimes they do. 

Consumers lacking in foresight

Think about the following: Sebastian is 32 years old, unmarried, outspoken and intelligent. His degree is in Economics. As a student he was deeply concerned with third-world debt, African aid and the anti-globalisation movement. Which statement is most likely to be true?

1. Sebastian works in advertising.
2. Sebastian works in advertising and he is an active supporter of Oxfam.

The correct answer is A, but if you answered B you will be in good company. Our minds tend to have made a number of assumptions about Sebastian. Key words such as ‘aid', ‘African' and ‘third-world' are associated with Oxfam. Therefore, we are more likely to make assumptions about Sebastian as a person, rather than keep an open mind. Chains of associations can work very well in moving swiftly from the exploration of an issue to an appropriate action, but for creative brand thinking, chains of associations leading to broadly-held assumptions stifle alternate ways of thinking.

If we are to have new, creative ideas about either an existing brand or a new one, why don't we go and ask consumers? As Gary Hamel points out, ‘consumers are notoriously lacking in foresight'.

So, insightful brand strategy, product innovation or communication, are often rooted in discontinuity. Discontinuities and disruptions don't just happen - they can be artificially engineered. All markets develop conventions and conformities. These are questionable because they may be based on old assumptions, rather than fact. But they can easily become sacred truth. Questioning those that appear the most suspect can lead to new hypotheses that form the basis of new insights. One of the most effective ways of teams manufacturing a new way of looking at things is through an assumption reversal, as this encourages them to view things from new perspectives.

So, how can you and your team break down widely held assumptions when you are confronted with a particular challenge? We use a technique we call Renegade to help you think about it in a different way. Non-marketing people are really good at it; they have less marketing ‘expertise'.

Doing the creative thing as a team: why and how?

These days there are more reasons than ever to seek out creative brand cultivation, making the best of the natural tendency toward brand co-creation.  Creativity needs to work in more places, more often, throughout the company; that is why it is more of an internal team game than ever before. Brand development is a process of internal cultivation not just a task for the marketing department.  A creative brand idea affects, directs and challenges the whole of the business.

Brands are not all logic; there has to be magic, but magic needs to be nurtured; given the right conditions. Magic makes sense, but only if it is sensibly managed.

So great brand ideas can and do come from anywhere, but they need help to be born, particularly in the parts of the business which are not fashionable and are not marketing. Someone knows something you need to know, and you need to know how to find it out.  Both organisations and the people in them have put in place processes that kill off attempts to break free from ‘more of the same' brand thinking. That's why so many new ideas get eliminated, because they do not tally with current values, or the organisational, brand or category norm.

Brand ideas that work, often start from help in understanding the unexpressed core. The people working right inside the business, understand this core, because they work with it every day, but invariably take it for granted.

Brand ideas that work need help in recognizing that consumers notoriously lack foresight. A point of view and a purpose will take you a long way, because people want to know what you stand for and how you can help them. Show your path, not their footsteps.

The magic of brands is dependent on the people who deliver it. The challenge is to make them uncover their own real brand magic, not something dreamed up in a communication company brainstorm. That is the real brand magic, which will stick with you and me, because we believe it and trust it.   

Open your mind

So, in summary, do the creative thing as a team. These days there are more reasons than ever to seek out creative brand cultivation, making the best of natural brand co-creation.  All brands can achieve this, if their teams have an open mind and a willingness to participate in the brand, far beyond their field of expertise. Break down associative barriers; combine the brand DNA in new and surprising ways.

Even if it's logical to stick within your own field of expertise, brand creativity comes from teams that desire to seek out and connect ideas and concepts from apparently unrelated backgrounds.

Edited version. Reproduced with permission of Admap, the world's primary source of strategies for effective advertising, marketing and research. To subscribe visit http://www.admapmagazine.com/.  © Copyright Admap. The full version of this article was first published by ADMAP in November 2007. Download the PDF to see a copy.