How To Use Strategy as a Benchmark for Evaluating Creative

I’m just not feeling it.

I’d like to see a different shade of blue.

I love it!

In food and beverage marketing (in any field, really), the output of the creative process is highly subjective. We look at design assets — logo, packaging, social advertising — from the perspective of our own likes and dislikes. It’s human nature.

But creative decisions are not about us. They are always about the brand and its audience.

I don’t mean to be critical here. Nobody in your conference room has the tools to evaluate creative output in a way that guarantees it will resonate with your consumers. Not business leaders, who frame decisions rationally. Not design leaders, who frame decisions emotionally. None of us are taught how to think and talk objectively about creative.

So my team and I work hard to educate the marketing and brand leaders we work with, to focus discussions about design on brand objectives, and remove personal biases from the room.

It isn’t easy, but it’s essential to the success of your brand.

Brand Strategy Focuses Creative Exploration

Your capital-B Brand — which we define as the promise you make and the ways in which you keep it — underpins every decision your organization makes. Not just design. A brand strategy intentionally limits your choices. It places guardrails around product innovation: “We don’t make pumpkin spice-flavored products.” It focuses your retail channels: “We aren’t a big-box brand.” It defines your pricing model: “We are a premium product.”

Because we tend to think the creative process is playful, we assume it should happen without boundaries. In fact, brand strategy gives it the right kind of parameters. (Imagine that I set a piece of paper in front of you and said, “You can write or draw anything you want, and in an hour I’m going to come back and tell you whether it works for me.”)

I like to think of brand strategy as a three-lane superhighway surrounding a city. The three lanes are your what (your competitive advantage and your audience), your how (your culture and onlyness), and your why (your mission and promise). The highway keeps all creative exploration and output within the city limits.

Brand strategy produces confidence and clarity in all decision making. Design is the physical manifestation that your strategy is right.

Reframing the Conversation About Creative Output

With strategy as the anchor point, the conversation about design options — regardless of the deliverable — changes. And designers need to shift their frame of reference for spearheading these discussions. (Leading creative evaluations is something Retail Voodoo excels at, and a key reason why so many of our design alumni have gone on to become rockstars in other organizations.)

When designers talk about their work in business terms instead of attributes like color and type, business managers are familiar with the language. The people who have to live with the decisions designers are making respond to their work differently. It steers the dialog out of emotional territory and prevents comments like “I feel it” or “it’s a vibe.”

Even if you have the smartest, bravest, most experienced execs in the room, if you don’t have the strategic framework, you’ll get input like, “I read on Bevnet that ombre is a trend in packaging,” or “I walked into Whole Foods yesterday and saw …”

By focusing the discussion not on preference but on how well the solution supports the brand strategy, creative directors typically gain approval in one or two rounds, even on big, transformative stuff.

When you’re preparing to lead a creative evaluation, here are some questions to consider:

• Will this resonate with the people we want to attract? (NOT: Will it make us in the room feel good?)
• Will this stand out on the shelf in a way that can’t be unseen? (NOT: Does this fit within the conventions of our category?)
• Does this communicate our story in a way that engages new customers and appeals to people who already love our brand? (NOT: Is this on-trend in color and typography?)

Signs That You’re Off Strategy

It’s easy to be seduced by a big idea. And in my experience, creative directors and agencies are really good at rewriting strategy to map to a killer design concept. So beware of falling in love with a solution that’s off strategy. How do you know if this is happening?

The most common sign is that the creative and marketing leads are willing to change the strategy vocabulary to fit the design. Or the creative team has to figure out how to accommodate someone’s personal preferences in the solution (“The brand manager wants blue, so how can we work blue into this design to make them happy?”)

Occasionally when working with food or beverage brands, we run into a senior person’s bias that we can’t overcome. So we treat it like the TV show Chopped: “OK, we have to use lamb brains and lemon meringue pie and pumpkin seeds.” And to the extent we can, we’ll connect those weird ingredients back to the strategy, so the solution makes sense.

Filtering Creative Conversations

Those personal preferences for visual expression — someone loves blue or hates serif type — will always be there. Mission-driven brands also have other cognitive biases that are important to recognize: They think their audience is just like them. And they think that a track record of success proves that their instincts are right.

When you and your colleagues evaluate any creative output, counteract those biases by applying a filter: It’s about our audience, not about us.

The goal is to get everyone to rally around a design translation not because it’s their favorite, but because it will whisper in the ear of your target audience in a way that competitors cannot. You won’t hope the solution works — you’ll know it will.You may be struggling to evaluate creative output with your team. It’s a common challenge — one that we’re really good at solving — so let’s talk.