The Difference Between Creative and Effective

Which is more valuable, a handful of gold, or a handful of salt? The gold sparkles with the promise of “the good life” and all it encompasses. The salt lies in your palm like so much dust. What’s the difference not readily seen?

Simply stated, the gold is very pretty, but you couldn’t survive without salt. Gold is very flashy and memorable, but devoid of life sustaining substance. So ask yourself, is your marketing communications memorably creative, or substantially effective? How can you tell the difference?

Not long ago, my spouse told me of a television commercial featuring several middle aged men obsessing over their hobby, restoring and racing Big Wheel tricycles. She found the spot very clever and funny. She admitted she had seen the spot a dozen or more times and never failed to be entertained. I asked who the advertiser was and what product they were promoting. She could not recall, even after a dozen or more exposures and a favorable impression of the material. Some days later I viewed the commercial and noted the product advertised was breakfast meats.

I do not understand the connection between sausage and adult males racing Big Wheel tricycles, nor was any connection attempted in the advertisement. Although the spot was certainly memorable for its creativity, the core objective of initiating change in the consumers buying behavior failed completely. Consumers were entertained, the marketer wins an award for creativity and perhaps goes on to direct music videos, and the advertiser receives no return for their marketing investment.

Effective marketing is both incredibly simple in concept yet complex in execution. Marketing is designed to initiate change in consumer behavior and disposition towards a product or service. This is accomplished by clearly communicating the benefits of the product with a precise call to action, and delivering the message to a qualified audience favorably disposed to purchase that exact product or service. The difficulty lies in differentiating your message from the estimated 3000 advertising messages each consumer is exposed to each day. It is this quest for memorability that mistakenly lures advertisers and professional marketers away from disciplined and effective communications, and into the entertainment business. And, its not just huge national advertisers succumbing to marketing messages obscured by disassociated plot lines and images. Local, home-grown companies are equally guilty.

I’ve observed dancing Santas to sell discount furniture and hillbillies tossing dynamite into lakes to catch fish used to sell furnaces. In each instance, the real message conveyed to consumers is one of desperation, “I’ll say or do anything to get your attention”. But is the goal of effective marketing communication to acquire the consumers’ attention to entertaining displays in print and broadcast, or to acquire their loyalty to a trusted brand that delivers value to their lives?

Communicating credibility creatively will not only achieve memorability, but will begin the branding process. One can be clever and even entertaining. But one should never lose sight of the core objective.

Dale Justice is a Partner of Justice & Young, a Cincinnati marketing and public relations firm.