Understanding Creative Strategy (contents post)

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Social media could be better for evergreen content, and the space in LinkedIn's profile showcase is limited and fills up quickly. So I have created this article as a "contents page", so people can easily follow the series, and I can update it with time.

The heart of strategy is creative. I've held this core belief for many years. It stands true for strategy as a discipline and any specific strategy. You can tell it by the gaps in the story when you try to understand the history of a particular case. Eventually, you come across those liminal spaces where the only explanation is that creative leaps were made.

In this series, I try and introduce a model for creative strategy. It looks at the awkward gap between marketing strategy and creative development, often ignored by marketing science and theory.

The model and the core series:

1. Triangulation: Building a simple unified model for creative strategy – in three layers (and triangles). Market, marketing, concept. A simplified overview of the model. There's also a visual summary.
2. Model walkthrough and footnotes: nerdily making our way through the parts of the model in more detail, commenting on some of its sources and my choices.
3. The paradigm in the wild: a series of references from advertising. How other frameworks, models and concepts echo the model's three win conditions.
4. Further out: more references of the three win conditions manifesting outside advertising into marketing and beyond.

Related content:

(not part of the same series, but shine a light on creative strategy issues with a similar approach)

• Get/to/bye-bye strategy: how to fix advertising's favourite framework. And a short follow-up.
• My take on the problem with brand archetypes and a follow-up. And another, a year later, critiquing a popular "fashion brand arechtypes" example.
• 'The leader's lament' = the curse of B2B marketing: podcast segment on the trope and dynamic that make so much B2B marketing bland despite excellent marketing professionals being invested in it and evidence pointing to the value of (relevant) distinction. And a written partner piece about making B2B more emotional.
• How we think about disruption: examining the tropes we use to tell business disruption stories and their significance.
• Out with the fluff — Brand Strategy returns to radical simplicity: a premature hope that brand frameworks and architecture were returning to simplicity. Spoiler alert: they didn't.
• The paradox of the paradox of choice: a short post casting doubt on how we think about one of the most famous behavioural biases in marketing.

Unrelated content (or is it?):

Some of my passionate takes. Probably too nuanced for my own good.

• A collection of my marketing pet peeves. Early 2023.
• Taming Marketing Babylon: why marketing's coolest feature is also its greatest demon, and what can be done.
• Strategy models are not orphans: a precursor piece. The need for theoretical history and context in strategy practice.
• The Dance of Creative Leadership: 5 principles of leading creative teams strategically.
• Marketing helped create post-truth politics but must resist their lure: written in 2016, as an alternative to a wave of LinkedIn and trade media takes about "what can marketing we learn from Trump" and that sort of thing.

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Oh, and V1.5 of "The Sceptic's Guide to ChatGPT" is here.