What if you don’t use ScienceFiction to create your advertising?
Stagnant brand growth? Forgettable advertising? Poor sales?
We might be using a touch of hyperbole* but getting people to think about what happens if they don’t use your product or service is also one of the 3 most effective creative devices to sell your brand.
The 2016 study, Creative That Sells: How Advertising Execution Affects Sales, provides some wonderful insights into the value of creativity for brands.
The study found that, “how advertisers chose to communicate is possibly more impactful than what is communicated.”
Or more specifically, creative execution devices are more important than message strategy devices.
When looking at creative execution devices, whilst there was no magic recipe, there were 3 clear stand outs:
The first is the classic ‘what if?’ that we started with; Placing an emphasis on what could happen when the product or service isn’t used. This twist on the classic product demonstration can help push the creative execution into more interesting territories that get the brand noticed.
The second creative device was humour and was found to have, “strong positive effects on recall and comprehension.” It appears that making your audience laugh also makes the brand more memorable.
The third device was actually one of caution; Use music carefully. Surprisingly, music of any kind including that which attempts to evoke emotion was found to have a negative relationship with sales. They theorised that ‘prominent mood-creating music‘ could distract from audio-message processing. The key outtake here is to integrate it into your creative much earlier on to avoid any negative effects.
Perhaps just as importantly the study concluded that, “though research offers some important guidelines…there is no magic formula for the creation of effective advertising.” So, it’s neither an exact science nor a mysterious art form. And if this sounds familiar to you, it’s a big part of why we called our agency ScienceFiction.
*There’s a little bit of truth in every hyperbole.