Advice on how to build creative teams and processes that allow your brand to be data-driven without being soulless, and memorable for the right reasons.
This content originally appeared in the No Best Practices newsletter on 11.27.2022.
Performance marketers vs creative marketers: it’s a battle as old as time. Brands with a DTC channel typically drift to one of two extremes when it comes to marketing creative:
Creative As A Bottleneck: Only one or two people in the organization can approve marketing assets before they’re used publicly. And those one or two people cannot delegate. So no matter how many “hands” are hired to develop creative assets, the team is always stretched to its limit and marketing never has enough assets to work effectively.
If you watch the Halston series on Netflix, the titular fashion designer literally develops a coke habit because he can’t delegate. Many such cases in the creative realm.
Staring Into The Void: This is the other side of the blade, just as sharp and just as deadly. Enter the performance marketing gunslinger who is doing whatever it takes to hit a ROAS target and sharing it all on Twitter.
In this rugged individual’s mind, anything is “on brand” as long as it works on Facebook and any customer is “our customer” as long as AOV exceeds CAC by the right margin. But without a structured testing strategy or the ability to draw a line in the sand and say “this is who we are”, it’s impossible to differentiate or learn.
If you’re selling things online, you’re going to need a 60-70% product margin to do it profitably. Behemoths like WalMart and Amazon make do with much less than that, and their pricing reflects it.
To earn that premium, you have to have exceptional products (obviously) and you have to stand for something. You must get people so fired up they set their rational mind aside for a moment.
But you need to balance emotion with pragmatism. The consumer does not care about your ~brand image~ if they’re trying to buy a tank top and you’ve styled it underneath three sweaters.
So here is my advice on how to build creative teams and processes that allow your brand to be data-driven without being soulless, and memorable for the right reasons.
Strategic Considerations
It wouldn’t be a No Best Practices newsletter if I didn’t give you some big-picture concepts before diving into the tactical stuff. You’ll get more out of your creative team if you take a step back to consider why you have one in the first place.
It’s Not “On Brand” Unless It’s “On Customer”
It’s shocking to me how few brands have a solid understanding of their customer base–who those people are, how much money they have to spend, and what they value. Without this knowledge, it’s impossible to develop coherent, effective brand positioning.
When you’re asking if something is “on brand”, you’re asking if it’s “on customer”. There is a difference between brand and visual identity. And visual identity without brand is simply an albatross that will drag your business down.
Everything Must Revolve Around Your Key Acquisition Channel
If you want to succeed in an acquisition channel–be it wholesale, TV or Facebook Ads–you need to develop creative that works with the channel’s format and its audiences’ expectations.
If you are a DTC brand primarily growing through Facebook ads, you should be developing creative assets for Facebook and then recycling them elsewhere. Slick, branded assets will have to take a back seat in this scenario. If you don’t “honor” your key acquisition channel creatively, your business will die.
There are a few common problems that brands, especially legacy brands, encounter with this principle. Some brands don’t know what their key acquisition channel is. If you’ve been around for decades, it might be word of mouth. But in that case, you should be able to invest in channel-specific creative for multiple channels.
Another scenario: a wholesale-focused brand wants to scale its DTC business. But the DTC arm receives the creative cast-offs from wholesale. Then they wonder why it’s impossible to break even on Facebook Ads.
No matter which way you slice it, you cannot scale profitably in a channel unless you’re developing creative the audience wants to see. That means different things across different channels, especially social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, etc.
If A Brand Can’t Be Delegated, It’s Not A Brand
A brand is not just a collection of things that one person likes. Brand decisions need to flow logically from customer insights. This makes brand decisions consistent, coherent and, ultimately, possible to delegate.
When you can’t delegate a brand, you run into the “Creative As A Bottleneck” scenario I outlined in the intro. Controlled substances are snorted, staplers are thrown at heads, Glassdoor reviews plummet. Everyone has a bad time.
This is harder in “creative” industries like fashion, or any category where “taste” is involved. But if your taste-based brand is looking to become a serious business, you need to get a real grasp of your customer to effectively serve him or her.
You can take measured bets on product innovation. You can take measured bets on marketing campaigns. But you can’t have one person vetoing proven strategies left and right because they’re withdrawing from Adderall or otherwise having a bad day.
Informed Hypotheses Make Testing Meaningful
If I had to TL;DR this section I would say “Just talk to your f***ing customers”. You need a solid customer fact base to develop good testing hypotheses. Without that, you will spin your wheels.
This doesn’t mean uninformed creative testing never works. It just results in fewer sustainable wins, and lots of footwork that creative teams grow to resent. People feel better about working hard when they are working towards a cohesive vision and occasionally get to rack up some nice, juicy wins for the ol’ resume.
Staffing/People Considerations
Often “capabilities” issues are actually people issues. Developing effective direct marketing creative is a learned skill. The ability to use Adobe Photoshop does not equal the ability to develop winning Facebook Ads creative.
If you’re a brand that is driving a lot of growth through Facebook Ads or another performance marketing channel, here are some things to consider:
$10M Revenue Brands Don’t Need A Full Time “Creative Director”
Ahhh…the Creative Director: preferred LinkedIn headline of FuckBois everywhere. If you’re doing under $10-20M in annual revenue, you don’t need one.
Founders and marketers often make this hire because they want to delegate the creative approval process. Reviewing and approving 10 emails and 50 Facebook Ads versions a week is a lot of work. But unless your CD has a strong direct response background, you’re going to wind up with a bunch of aesthetically pleasing but ineffective creative.
When you’re under $20M in revenue, you really need to think about the tradeoff between effort and impact. Hire a branding firm to develop a brand book once. Hire a marketer to collaborate with that firm on channel-specific do’s and dont’s. Then, hire good channel managers and empower those people to follow your guidelines. More on how to do this in the Ops section below.
Hire Experts In Your Key Acquisition Channel First
Your key acquisition channel is going to take up the majority of your time, consume the majority of your marketing budget, and carry the majority of your potential for risk and reward. If you only have the budget to hire one creative person, make it someone who is an expert in your key acquisition channel.
For many of you reading this, that channel is Facebook Ads. Hire someone who specializes in developing killer paid social creative, not a graphic designer with general experience. Or, design processes that reduce the overall need for graphic design (more in the next section), and outsource ad creation to a killer freelancer or agency.
If you want to grow (especially in a recession), you have to start thinking of everything in terms of leverage. If there is a bucket of work, what portion of that work is truly value-additive? Invest in that, and simplify the rest so that it can be outsourced to low cost resources or go away entirely.
Operational Considerations
Ok, here it is, what you’ve all been waiting for: tactics you can throw out in Monday’s weekly team meeting to impress your boss.
A Good Brand Book Covers All Use Cases
Most of the brand books I’ve seen contain the following: a mission statement, a few “keywords” that describe the brand (“Cool, Easy, Chic!”), a brief history of the brand, brand fonts, brand colors, 1-3 versions of the logo and how to use it.
Given this standard, it’s no wonder that internal teams generate so many ideas that are allegedly “off brand”. This style of brand book leaves almost everything up to interpretation.
Here are some components of a brand book that I consider absolutely critical if you want to set up marketing and creative teams for success:
- Descriptions of 1-3 core customer profiles, informed by consumer research, customer interviews and/or real transaction data. This should not be a made-up buyer persona like “Frankie Fashionista”. It should help the reader understand who buys your stuff, why they like your stuff, and which stuff they buy.
- Brand value props. These are the “talking points” that connect your customers to the brand. These should be used liberally in any marketing you produce.
- Best selling products and their key features.
- Do’s and Dont’s at a channel level, for your 2-4 most important marketing channels. This includes guidelines for lo-fi creative–if you have to pass off guidelines to an influencer or content creator, what do they need to know to be successful?
- Examples of top-performing creative for your 2-4 most important marketing channels. Creative people actually love to know what works, and they like to win. Unless they’re resentful of your target customer (see “No Assholes Rule” below).
Use Tech To Release Creatives From Drudgery
Why, in the year of our lord 2022, are we still designing magazine-style email layouts entirely in Photoshop? Just design and build drag and drop template components that cover the majority of your messaging use cases. Same thing for elements like Homepage or Category Page banners–build out CMS blocks in Shopify so a marketer can type in some copy and upload a picture.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about here, see this “before” email (Photoshop method) and this “after” email (drag and drop blocks).
HTML-based emails almost always perform better than big image slices. People can scale up the text so they can actually read it, and the text elements load fast on slow internet connections.
Testing copy, messaging focus and imagery is a high-leverage use of your time. Building out email flows to address different phases of the lifecycle is a high-leverage use of your time. Editing a PSD at the 11th hour because you noticed a typo in the fine print section is not a high-leverage use of anyone’s time.
Asset Banks = Key To Pain Free Iteration
You want to put processes in place that enable individual channel teams to produce on-brand assets without a graphic designer, 90% of the time. Drag and drop email and web templating solves part of this problem. Creative approves a set of layouts once, then eCom and marketing teams can take them and run with them.
Asset banks solve another part of this problem, especially for larger teams and brands. At the start of the week/month/season creative drops some approved photography and copy points in a folder. The focus of this copy and photography is driven by marketing needs. Then, marketing is free to mix and match the assets as they’d like.
If marketing is producing some really heinous finished product, then take a step back and examine root causes. But between the asset banks, the templates and the brand book, marketing should be able to iterate without irrevocably tarnishing your brand reputation.
Institute A No Assholes Rule
Here’s a take that is going to get me cancelled, but I’ve found it to be true again and again and again: most senior “creatives” wish they were working somewhere cooler than your brand. But “somewhere cooler” rarely pays the bills.
To cope with this, creatives will enter a state of denial about who your true customer is, and what really appeals to him or her. They will always be fighting a covert war to “elevate” your brand, which is code for “do the work I wish I was doing at Cooler Brand”.
These creatives will use “it’s not on brand” as a way to prevent you from making them produce work that they don’t want to produce. You cannot let this virus infect your company. And that is why a sound creative strategy must start with a coherent understanding of the customer.