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The key to developing a marketing or sales message for a Brand is a well thought out strategy. For a message to be compelling, it must be highly focused and precise. This requires making difficult choices and excluding options that are logical, plausible and attractive.

A Creative Strategy Directs All Communications

A creative strategy defines the important strategic choices required to develop a marketing message. The creative strategy (often called a copy or advertising strategy) defines what you will say about your product or service. It explains how you want consumers to think about your Brand.

The creative strategy guides and directs the development of current and future sales messages, brochures, and advertising. A written creative strategy becomes a potent management tool for directing the activities of advertising agencies. It clearly articulates how the product or service will be presented to customers and positioned versus competitors.

Components of a creative strategy

What You Say Is More Important than How You Say It

Overall Objective:

The purpose for making the communication: the problem to be solved; what action or change you want to result from the communication.

Target Audience:

To whom you wish to communicate your message. Knowing this group defines what information to convey, how to say it, and how to deliver it.

Promise:

A single idea that explains why the target audience should take the action you desire. This one idea should summarize the benefit the target audience can expect to receive.

Support:

Facts and perceptions that make the promise believable.

Positioning:

Explain how your product or service is different from competitors and how you want the target audience to think about your Brand in comparison with other Brands.

Tone:

Emotional guideline that helps select vocabulary and style of presentation.

Net Impression:

What you would like the target audience to state after having been exposed to the communication.

Executional Guidelines:

Direction or constraints on the forms and/or content of the execution. This section is optional but should be used if company policies, the intended use of the communication, or other factors not embodied in the strategy will provide limits on what is acceptable.

In order to prepare a creative strategy, it is necessary to learn why people buy your product or service, and which benefit has the largest impact on the target audience. Understanding what that benefit is and why it is important allows you to develop the promise and support sections of the creative strategy. When preparing marketing communications or a sales message, always remember that what you say is more important than how you say it.

All material copyright © 1995-2012 by Urban Wallace Associates.