Keith Bates Blog

NEED TO STAND OUT IN YOUR MARKET?

Maybe your website is sending the wrong message!

September 19, 2017

What’s keeping you from grabbing a bigger market share?

One bright idea probably! For giants we’ve pushed their sales into the billions. For small to mid-size clients we’ve helped them achieve millions. Value innovation is the challenge.

Creative Strategist

Where do bright ideas come from? Advisory boards!

Budget not up to a full service advertising agency? The trend is to advisory boards. And part of the reason for this trend is the plethora of marketing tools available. The transformation from yesterday’s simple media planning into today’s social media can be mind boggling.

But keep one thought in mind. Social media is MEDIA. It’s a conduit. It’s not Messaging. It’s about delivery, not about ideas. People are influenced by the content of the Message, rarely the pipeline through which it is delivered.

If your messaging lacks a soul — it’s a zombie!

Consider this quote from a recent ADWEEK interview of Tham Khai Meng, worldwide chief creative officer of Ogilvy & Mather, by writer James Cooper… “How do you keep your focus in such a transforming environment?” And from Tham, “Thinking about Zombies helps. That’s something I learned long ago when I first started writing ads and began a lifelong quest for something called the idea. It’s all about the idea, and always will be. When the ad doesn’t have an idea, it’s got no soul—like a zombie. The job always is to find it. Get down the mine shaft and look for the nugget of gold, and don’t come back without it.”

Or consider this recent headline from the Wall Street Journal, “Companies Set Up Advisory Boards to Improve Digital Savvy”. Digital savvy is nice, perhaps valuable, but it lacks the power of creativity. And creativity must also be added to your advisory board. For companies not ready for full advisory boards a preliminary step is contracting with a Creative Strategist.

Build yourself a mixing bowl. Insert the right ingredients.

The Creativity Module, third and last module of Bates’ Communications Support Planning process consists of two key components: core intelligence & theme/image standards. This is the mixing bowl where the ingredients provided by the audit and strategy modules become core intelligence, and are blended with raw creative power to produce THE BIG IDEA (lightning bolt) which is the source of all communications energy and the basis for our theme/image standards. Attitude changes occur through changes in brain chemistry … so think of yourselves as chemists… working on penetration and retention. The process is explained in detail in a white paper titled Probing the Mystery of Creativity.

 

For a copy of Probing the Mystery of Creativity simply email a request to keithbates@kbates.com. It will be sent promptly.

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Keith Bates has enjoyed a lifelong, around the world, passion for helping people communicate whether it was school buddy book reports or his former ad agency client’s marketing. Keith is different.

A content writer/strategist’s ability lets them see things others don’t. Keith learned early in life that provocative content and imaging were required to change attitudes and beliefs.

This skill came in handy with Keith’s more than 200 clients over the years, most of them software vendors, who found the requirement of translating developer language to end user language pretty challenging.

And today we have a new challenge, only it’s not inventor vs. end user but messaging vs. media. It’s OK to add digital media complexity for message distribution, but not for messaging requirements. 

 

Get a FREE creative assessment of your site vs. competitors. Study download.

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