How do the world’s best creative people find insights and nuggets for brilliant storytelling which creates memorable campaigns and builds winning brands? The one-word answer – curiosity.
While the Creativity question gets hotly discussed in the Cannes Festival and the likes, my wife, Eika and I remember asking this question in 2018 while researching our book, 52RedPills. For our chapter on CREATIVITY, we turned to Piyush Pandey, one of the world’s most creative people and an advertising OG. Over the course of three hours that we spent with him understanding what makes him a creative genius, I distilled three nuggets from him for keenly knowing the pulse of consumers and gleaning nuggets from everyday connects. First – he talks to a lot of different people – from his office guards to people in an airport queue – and listens to a range of voices. I recollect him saying – “Nai Bahut Baatuni Hota hai” (the barber is talkative (hence, an excellent source of delicious tit-bits)). Second– he mentioned that a lot of stories and insights come from authentic, unfiltered conversations from unconventional sources. Piyush shared that he loves talking to children and old people since both groups mostly “don’t give a damn” (and can say what is on their minds). And third- Piyush shared stories about his “memory palace” which held a mega-store of memories, anecdotes and flashes of insights collected across his life journey from Jaipur, Ranji cricket, the early advertising days and then multiple legendary Ogilvy-client partnerships. All this magnificent storytelling has created decades of business-building and award-winning campaigns for a range of clients across diverse industries.
Another way of mining nuggets from consumer behaviour – which can influence the entire spectrum of the marketing mix from product prototyping to communication development. The art of running Insights Activator workshops, a discipline which I imbibed in my years at Hindustan Unilever, was a useful way to mine insights. Depending upon the target audience, it pays to conduct Focus Groups, do assisted Shopping Visits or Basket Deep Dives, or pick up signals from Social Media Tracking. In one’s daily life, it pays to speak to diverse sets of people, or read diverse magazines or websites and set up opportunities to meet audiences and people that one would not, in the daily course of life. Be curious.
Once you have a storehouse of actionable insights, it is extremely important to ensure that the insight connects with your brand / company and does not stay as a generic insight. That is the difference which advertising and marketing folks know as Category insight versus Brand Insight. Take for example, an advertising idea which says that Tea is the real social network of India. This is a great example of a category insight and can be attributed all (good) teas. What would make the campaign relevant and useful for a tea brand, is if this category insight can be suffused with the brand essence. Hence, the art of storytelling married with the art of brand management can pay rich dividends for a brand or company. No wonder then, it is when logic and magic come together, history gets made!
The author is one of India’s leading business leaders and a well-regarded marketer across diverse industries. All views expressed are personal.