Why MUST Recruitment Make Creativity Business Critical?
If a design is just an image, colour and words, then the recent Gov's campaign ‘Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.’ shows just how creativity can damage a brand if a proper creative process hasn’t been followed.
Not that the Government needs to run a campaign to damage their image…
The campaign went viral because people relate to people taking the piss out of something that's hysterical as an idea. If the intention was to appeal to people’s humour, then the campaign has indeed done a fine job in annoying its intended audience. But are the Government and Cyber First bright enough to have planned that? I’m not so sure…
They certainly have the budget to spend on a half-decent creative, so just why did the campaign fail so badly?
Did they put their ‘grubby’ stamp on the creative? Maybe it was an idea floating about in BoJo's head? Who knows what madness goes on underneath that mop…
The simple truth is that ideas fail when you have not defined their purpose or intent.
Similar patterns happen in the world of Recruitment Marketing. A lack of process, planning, ideation, research, understanding of intent, its purpose, how it relates to people, insights, validating, testing and so on can lead an idea to completion with truly devastating results.
It affects Recruitment as an industry and in turn how people perceive Recruitment and the job market at large. It serves to pay a little attention to how you define your brand or messages. People are vulnerable, any dumb arse idea will get buried, parodied, and called out. Period.
People lose trust and loyalty to brands even though that cannot be the intention of any business. It's just badly defined. That's what happens when you don’t make creativity business-critical. We see this in the way that people have become so much more resilient to bullshit now than they ever were before.
Why not start by defining your brand and message first? What IS the intention, who is it aimed for? If you haven’t done the basic legwork, it is all too easy to screw up a half-decent idea.
Telling people to be anything BUT the thing they worked their arses off throughout their whole lives to be is definitely NOT it.
These types of campaigns would be better suited as an art installation in ‘The Museum of Dumb Arse Art,’ next to the line of parodies. There have been some cracking memes and the campaign’s to ease the pain people suffer from that idea but still, it goes to show:
Making creativity business-critical takes work
It takes people who are skilled at knowing how to do it by following the proper processes
Otherwise, when creativity is seen as ‘subjective’, it may damage the brand, business, reputation and in the worst-case scenario, peoples’ lives.
If you would like to know more about making creativity business-critical or about how you can make design work more efficiently for your brand give me a shout.
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Thank you to Emma Coyle, Psychodynamic Counsellor at Dynamic Counselling for support on write up.
Thank you to @theresilient_thrive for the creative image. The Resilient is launching a series of training courses to the next Gen Z and Gen X generation of leaders including the first one ‘Don’t Admire the problem, be the resilient’ going live in November.