Can crime be inspirational in marketing?

We work with service brands to help them build better propositions for their customers. Part of the what we do involves ideation type activities to find more engaging ways for brands to resonate with customers.

Using creative activities, the sessions are structured so that clients arrive at new and unordinary outcomes. One of my favourite parts of the job is to hear the exciting ideas generated during these sessions. To  achieve this we spend time at Lexden honing the creative activities we use in the workshops to achieve results.

So when I come across examples of propositions in market which are different to the norm I will take a step back and consider how their process might have worked to allow them to get to somewhere new.

One area I always feel must be challenging to arrive at ‘out of the box’ solutions is crime prevention, given the seriousness and the public scrutiny of the subject matter. But as these examples show, it is possible to arrive at some very unexpected solutions.

Fashion defence

Japanese designer,  Aya Tsukioka created a dress which doubles as a Coca Cola vending machine should the owner feel threatened and want to blend into the background.

Bonkers, perhaps. But I believe it’s an idea which has only been conceived because of the type of contributors involved. When running ideation sessions it’s important to make sure the invitation list is wide reaching and includes those you wouldn’t normally turn to for solutions but have insight into the subject in hand.  

In financial services I find people from risk are very good at idea generation if given encouragement. Give these renegade types (the non-marketers) the tools and permission to run off in unordinary directions and they will often surprise you with the territories and solutions they get to.

Miss Tsukioka said: ‘It is just easier for Japanese women to hide. Making a scene would be too embarrassing.’ She added: ‘These ideas might strike foreigners as far fetched, but in Japan, they can become reality.’

From DC to Brazil

Andre Luiz Pinheiro, a retired police officer, has been drafted in by the police to the Brazilian city of Taubate. In a city where the murder rate is 12 times that of London they have turned to fiction to change the crime facts.

Andre is Batman. Batman is Andre. And he is inspiring children to consider an alternative life than crime, “I am fighting crime in a preventative way by helping these children to avoid becoming criminals.”

It’s a long term strategy which has the full support of the police. They were looking for symbols of good that they could leverage and help inspire children.

Batman fits ‘the bill’.

Imagine how that would have sounded when it first came up in the ideation session! To let these ideas live a little, it’s important to forget the world in which you inhabit sometimes and think about your audiences world in order to see what the outcome might look like – as they would have done here. Is it working? Time will tell.

Crime can backfire as a creative territory

But as this Sony example shows, using crime as an entry point for something as escapist as entertainment is more challenging to pull off.

When Sony launched The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on DVD they decided to style the DVD to look like a pirate copy.

I have seen the Swedish original and assume the piracy theme is meant to link more to the crime genre rather than the film itself. But either way it was intended to make the film stand out.

And it did, but not in the way intended. Those renting the DVD thought the shoddy looking production was really a pirate copy and not a gimmick. So rather than enjoy the film, thousands returned it to their DVD rental store for a genuine replacement. Only to find out it was genuine. Do you think that enhanced their enjoyment of the film? I assume not.

It also highlights how some territories don’t work so well when creating ideas for products or campaigns. Whilst an interesting idea, if the agency had run a ‘de-risk’ activity after the idea was conceived they would have spotted this potential flaw, looked into it further and canned the idea. The de-risk activity is an important post-idea generation exercise often overlooked. 

So there is much to learn from crime when it comes to idea generation. I hope these examples inspire you to push your ideation sessions a little further.

My point is this; as long as you start with a customer’s motivations and end with customer betterment, by leveraging a brand’s advantage and validating the viability of any solution, then what you do inbetween needs to break the rules in order to be authentic and stand-out.

Lexden is a marketing strategy agency which achieves cut-through propositions for our clients. To do this we look beyond the familar towards the unordinary. To find out more about what we do and if that might be of interest to you please visit our website lexdengroup.com

Or contact christopherbrooks@lexdengroup.com or ajairanawat@lexdengroup.com, or call us on T: +44 (0)20 7490 9123. 

Creating brilliant ideas is in all of us

If your position requires you to be creative, you are blessed. It’s a privilege to be encouraged to suspend what you know and create what doesn’t exist. I am fortunate to count myself as one of those who spends time each week creating.

My creative bias is marketing strategy, but I think my point holds for most genres of the artistic science. But it’s not an exclusive club. We are all gifted with ability to create, given the right ingredients.

#1 Take from your own creative palette

Once you’ve got a brief (focused permission) you need a palette of reference. This is personal and it’s different for us all. For some it’s Ian Dury, a passion for designer shoes, an obsession with the Four Tops, the last year of lectures at university or even the pop culture consumed over the weekend. All have been quoted back to me as inspiration behind an idea.

Of course our sources and memories are vast, unstructured, badly organised and blurred over time which makes it the greatest library for creativity available to us – so use it.

The reason being that as Paul Arden sort of puts it, ‘it does not matter where you take ideas from, it’s where you take them to which matters.’

#2 Building your own ideas labyrinth

I have ways to structure ideas, and techniques to hold thoughts and return to them and add small advancement weeks later.  They have taken years of refining by listening to others approaches and forming my own archaic but ultimately successful network in my mind. As a consequence they are messy and probably only effective for me.

#3 Finding your own creative workshop

But there is one aspect which I believe can be replicated by all and that’s the creative space. You never hear a rock star saying I wrote the hit whilst sat at my desk. Unless you apply a regimental Roald Dahl like approach to creating ideas (yellow pencils, yellow paper, white writing shed, red tin of sweets, green sleeping bag etc) I suggest finding a variety of places which encourage your creativity. Find places which trigger ideas by their significance or by highlighting your own insignificance. Either way they inspire me to arrive at new outcomes I hadn’t reached before I spent time there. Below are three of my favourite. I like to think of them as my creative workshops.

The British Museum workshop

I recently met with a friend in the cafe and we came up with an idea which could change his life and possibly a way in which an established part of his industry works. It’s the height here. You sit with one hundred and fifty feet of headspace. And all areas are shared so you get a buzz all the time from the lives others are living around you. And whilst all around are consuming we are creating. Contributing to the future. NB. Bring some change as the cafe doesn’t take plastic for less than £5.

The Building Centre (Store Street) workshop

When you walk in you are welcomed by a 3D model of London’s landscape including those planned developments. You can trace your route to work and figure out in miniature how much of London’s footprint you actually cover. I’d suggest unless you are a town planner, cabbie or a tourist it’s probably not very much.

Move around the centre and you will find 3D photocopiers, new material exhibitions and stories about the impact of commercial and residential developments in London.

You feel like you are getting the ‘inside’ story on the city, which is empowering. You start to see something you know very well from a new perspective. Bingo. This is exactly why it provides such a fabulous new canvas for creativity. There are many break out areas and a decent cafe too.

Edinburgh Castle view workshop (Princes Street)

High above Princes Street in Edinburgh is the Debenhams Cafe which, with its convex windows, has a ceiling to floor view over Princes Street Gardens and up towards Edinburgh Castle. Take lunch at 1pm and you can even hear the roar of the ceremonial cannon. It’s never occupied by anyone except shoppers so you can lose yourself in thought and vista. The clash of timeless significance and throw away everyday retail make it a heady cocktail.

It’s the sort of view of the castle many are looking for, but it’s not the sort of place you’d think to come to get it so you can get lost in your thought. Admittedly the windows need a clearer Perspex solution, but the view has always fuelled my imagination.

Obviously, we are all gifted with the ability to create ideas. We do it everyday. If it’s your job you’d hope you are better at it than others. But if you can create the right environment, it’s interesting to see what you can achieve.

So if you want to be creative, you need do nothing more than get off your backside and take a walk. It’s free and it frees the mind. And who knows the rest might just come to you.

Lexden is a marketing strategy agency which achieves cut-through propositions for our clients. To do this we look beyond the familar towards the unordinary. To find out more about what we do and if that might be of interest to you please visit our website lexdengroup.com

Or contact christopherbrooks@lexdengroup.com or ajairanawat@lexdengroup.com, or call us on T: +44 (0)20 7490 9123.