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What is a Concept?
Behind every good advertising/marketing piece is a creative concept, a “Big Idea” that makes the message relevant, unexpected, and persuasive. It gives your brand or product or company a consistent, memorable personality.
To come up with the big idea you have to move away from the safety of the strategy statements and leap into the creative unknown. You might ask, “Why not just run the strategy statement? Is says everything we want said.” Strategy statements, while important platforms for in-house discussion, aren’t distinctive, attention-getting, and memorable. A concept gets across the message and fulfills the strategy in a way that will persuade a customer to buy or believe something.
How do we come up with a creative concept or big idea? A concept may come to mind as a visual, a phrase, or a throught that uses both visual and verbal expression. Usually, the concept takes shape after extensive research. It is, after all, just one step in the creative process.
Alex Osborn, who established the Creative Education Foundation, describes the creative process as:
- Orientation: pointing out the problem
- Preparation: gathering pertinent data
- Analysis: breaking down the relevant material
- Ideation: piling up alternative ideas
- Incubation: stepping back and inviting illumination
- Synthesis: putting the pieces together
- Evaluation: judging the resulting idea
Simply put—a creative concept is the bid idea around which an entire campaign revolves. |
