Sometimes being creative is about how you frame your thinking.
Rather than putting more creativity into trying to get consumers to drink more beer when she worked at Heineken, experienced marketer Patricia Corsi knew the right way to look at it was to ask: why are people drinking less beer and what does that mean for the brand.
“The consumer is the sun from a business perspective,” said Corsi, chief marketing officer at Kimberly-Clark, during a panel at Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit in London. “If we pick the consumer as the center of our system, we need to understand that and then apply creativity to that.”
Corsi also encouraged marketers to use courage when creating work. At Kimberly-Clark brand Huggies, she applied this herself on a campaign called “Expensive Shit.” The ads showed babies wearing leaking diapers in expensive situations – a Vera Wang wedding dress, a white car, an Italian sofa – and showed the leakage risks of not using the highest quality diaper.
“We’re solving a consumer problem in a way that is fun,” said Corsi. “How do you bring creativity?”
From left to right: Moderated by: Rahmon Agbaje, Founder, Loud Parade; Sergio Peniche, Global Marketing Capabilities Sr. Director, Mars; Ian Smith, Director Of eCommerce & Marketing, Urban Outfitters
Creativity can help brands connect to consumers and building connections is the key to breaking through the noise of a fragmented media landscape. For Sergio Peniche, global marketing capabilities senior director at Mars said that when we are trust is core to building meaningful connections.
“When we’re talking about connecting with consumers, the first thing that we have to think is how are we going to be able to build trust through the entire relationship and it goes from the way that we engage in the different activities in the different marketing and communication activities but also in the way that our products themselves act,” said Peniche.
Peniche said they don’t do mass campaigns but instead focus on community building and showing up in culture where people are talking about snacking. “It’s not necessarily something that people would be embracing as like, ‘I’m going to be part of the M&Ms community,’ it’s how we are part of their considerations, how we get on part of the of the repertoire and they think of our brands because they could have fun and enjoy.”
For instance, in Asia, the confectioner has done work with K-Pop culture and partnering with influencers and celebrities like Kim Mingyu for fun events that consumers want to attend.
Ian Smith, director of ecommerce & marketing at Urban Outfitters agreed that connecting to the community is core to the success of the brand, but stressed it has to be genuine.
“It’s about being consistent, genuine and authentic in the way that you’re building brands and the way that you’re building relationships,” he said. “Because if you are not being genuine the audience knows this very clearly. When you’re trying to squeeze the brand into a place that is not the natural environment for you, they know they will push you out.”
From left to right: Matteo Atti, Global Chief Marketing Officer, VistaJet; Beatrice Boue, Global Head of Digital Marketing & Media, De Beers Group
For Beatrice Boue, global head of digital marketing & media at De Beers Group noted that it is important to understand consumers and their culture to connect. For example, in China, some female CEOs project power by wearing diamond tiaras in the boardroom.
“People have always created products to project who they want to be,” she said. “How we dress shows who we are.”
When looking to recruit new consumers, the brand is finding the moments. One such moment was a father admiring his grown daughter. The brand created a father and daughter campaign in India that was highly successful as it struck an emotional cord of fathers admiring their grown daughters. They also created campaigns around the moments of self love, following the consumer trend. “It is about finding an emotional moment and having a touchpoint with the brand,” said Boue.
From left to right: Norm Johnston, Senior Vice President, Head of Global Advertising Strategy, News Corp; Raja Rajamannar, Senior Fellow, Mastercard
Legendary chief marketing officer Raja Rajamannar, who is currently senior fellow at Mastercard, said that brands that want to break through should be on top of microtrends. Mastercard has built a repository of messages and product offerings so that it is easy for the teams to respond to microtrends – trends that bubble up and last for three days before fizzling up before the next one comes along.
“In a few seconds, it predicts, these are the next three trends which are going to happen. It will look up my repository and say, these are the three things that should be done. For each one of them, it will create an ad,” explains Rajamannar. “Then it will do A-B testing on the ad, 300,000 varieties using synthetic data, since it optimizes the advertisement, it goes and looks for the cheapest way to get into the conversation stream, buys the media, gets the placement, measures the click-throughs, and tells me by the end of the day, Raja, today we have created this particular campaign, this is how the output is.”
Rajamannar talked about how AI is shifting how information is shared drastically. He mentioned bixonimania – a fake medical condition of sore eyes invented by researchers in 2024 to test AI reliability. The researchers fed it into AI and social feeds and it spread quickly and 90 million people started searching for it (they since corrected the misinformation). The point being that information can spread like wildfire.
“This is the time of transition.,” said Rajamannar. “We can decide the path. We can shape the future. If you grasp it now, the first thing you have to do is learn like crazy. Learn everything there is to be learned about AI.”
Rajamannar warned that AI would replace humans at jobs and discredited the common belief that people that know how to use AI will still have jobs. “There is an existential threat,” he said.
However, he said not all is lost. “What you have to focus on is to move away from the classical marketing things and into immersive experiences for people,” he said. “Make them realize that you are human, you understand their humanity, you connect at a human level. It’ll change the game completely.”
