Any communication is never complete until it has reached in its entirety to its audience, which has understood it well enough to exhibit the message reception and absorption by showing a behaviour change. Whether it is to increase the customer base or just to build followership, it calls for creating a significant drive from within the established mindsets of the audience to bring about a change in their behavioural patterns. Breaking the ice with the well-conditioned minds of diverse audiences is a tough task for all brand communicators.
Messages are cryptically weaved through a chain of words and images, which make an impact over the minds of the audience and get them to behave in a certain, specific, and desired fashion. As amazing it is as a task, as challenging it is too, and achieving this cannot be done by normal communication usually. That’s where lateral thinking, creative expression, and innovations in communications come into play, making the brand communicators successful at their jobs.
Whether it’s a board announcement or launch of a new marketing communications campaign or just an internal newsletter, it is the creative route that makes an impact on the ultimate results. If the communication breaks the monotonous, routine, mundane, boring ways and done through fresh ideas, the audience is usually more receptive.
The idea is the essence of communication. However, one requires to carefully explore, evaluate, discuss, and implement any idea thoughtfully before considering rapid implementation. Creative ways of doing things are always aberrations from the established norms, and there are often more questions asked when things are being seen from a different perspective.
Imagination and curiosity, something we extensively use while we are children, and lose it substantially as we grow up due to the mechanised way of life and our social conditioning. We start accepting so many things as normal in our life and we forget questioning, querying, inquiring, probing, or delving into something deeper. The same thing applies to even our communication practices, horizontally and vertically, if we have to observe our day to day life at work as communication specialists.
Words, visuals, audio, video, and various other forms of communication become further noticeable, eye-catching, attention-grabbing, and come at the top of the mind recall if they are presented in a creative fashion. Being creative is not being funny or different, but it’s about giving a different view, perspective, angle, opinion, point of view, or a twist for that matter to the normally presented things.
Often there are obstacles to creative solutions, in communication as generally, people tend prefer a safe, straight-jacketed, and linear approach. They do it because they want to play safe and have a fear of failure if taking a unique or different route to achieve the same objective.
Most often in organisations, creative people face certain resistance to their ideas, however, this also presents a great opportunity for the brand communicators to identify the creative streaks within the organisation and seek their inputs in finding solutions, which eventually can be more effective and impactful.
The impact of creative communication can be multi-fold on any business including creating a great perception among its target audiences, a highly satisfied employee pool, and enhanced productivity for that matter. Creativity being the effort of the individual and the team can bring in huge benefits for the entire organisation.
Creativity is not about being normal but rather is about creating a new normal for the times to come, with a clear vision. Creative organisations and creative individuals usually have this uncanny knack for viewing things not as they are, and the power of imagination is best utilised by them. And the organisations that nurture creative people are usually more successful compared to their peers in the business or any other activity for that matter.
The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.
Praveen has been closely associated with many national and international events related to cinema for children, art and culture. He has a well-rounded experience that cuts across all key sectors of PR & Corporate Communications.
He started his career with URJA Communications, an advertising agency specialising in technology brands, where he was instrumental in developing the PR division. Post this, he had a stint with Horizons Porter Novelli, a global public relations consultancy. Thereafter, he was heading the IT & Telecom division at Clea PR, a leading Indian public relations and communications company followed by a fairly long stint with Omnicom Group agencies viz. TBWA\India and Brodeur India.
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