The Marketing Society of Ireland welcomed leading global strategist and founder of 'Out Of The Box LLP’ agency, Justin Kent, as the key note speaker at a virtual industry event. The session entitled Creativity Craves Crisis explored insights around how a crisis (or tension) can and should lead to ground breaking creativity.
With 35 years’ experience across over 150 brands, Kent, delved in to the nature of this tension, the different sources of tension, creative examples of tension, implicit and explicit and how the current crisis allows for fertile creative ideation.
1. Brands Need to Step Up: In the past, consumers have questioned the role of brands, but to come through this crisis, they actually need brands to do their job more than ever before; to support, to lighten, to inspire and to trust.
2. Shift the Mental Needle: Creativity, more than money, is the only tool marketeers have at their disposal to encourage consumers to question, wonder and think. Like art and culture, without creativity, there is unlikely to be any shift of the mental needle.
3. Originality and Tension: The two most essential ingredients of creativity are originality and tension. An idea that isn’t just fresh and new but that stretches us. Stretches against some fixed point in our mind, whatever that might be.
4. The Paradigm Shift: This paradigm shift, riddled with tension, uncertainty, hope and fear provides a hotbed for creativity, brands ought to tug at and pull, to build communication that genuinely enters people’s lives.
5. Lead from Front: Brands that lead from the front with honesty, integrity, intuition and a lightness of touch, knowingly, implicitly or otherwise, tugging at or pulling on a tension deeply felt, will be the ones consumers need today and for time to come more than ever.
