creative research strategies

What is Creative Research?

What is "creative" or "artistic" research how is it defined and evaluated how is it different from other kinds of research who participates and in what ways - and how are its impacts understood across various fields of inquiry.

After more than two decades of investigation, there is no singular definition of “creative research,” no prescribed or prevailing methodology for yielding practice-based research outcomes, and no universally applied or accepted methodology for assessing such outcomes. Nor do we think there should be.

We can all agree that any type of serious, thoughtful creative production is vital. But institutions need rubrics against which to assess outcomes. So, with the help of the Faculty Research Working Group, we have developed a working definition of creative research which centers inquiry while remaining as broad as possible:

Creative research is creative production that produces new knowledge through an interrogation/disruption of form vs. creative production that refines existing knowledge through an adaptation of convention. It is often characterized by innovation, sustained collaboration and inter/trans-disciplinary or hybrid praxis, challenging conventional rubrics of evaluation and assessment within traditional academic environments.

This is where Tisch can lead.

Artists are natural adapters and translators in the work of interpretation and meaning-making, so we are uniquely qualified to create NEW research paradigms along with appropriate and rigorous methods of assessment. At the same time, because of Tisch's unique position as a professional arts-training school within an R1 university, any consideration of "artistic" or "creative research" always references the rigorous standards of the traditional scholarship also produced here.

The long-term challenge is two-fold. Over the long-term, Tisch will continue to refine its evaluative processes that reward innovation, collaboration, inter/trans-disciplinary and hybrid praxis. At the same time, we must continue to incentivize faculty and student work that is visionary and transcends the obstacles of convention.

As the research nexus for Tisch, our responsibility is to support the Tisch community as it embraces these challenges and continues to educate the next generation of global arts citizens.

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Creative Research Methods

A Practical Guide

By helen kara.

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• Description

Creative research methods can help to answer complex contemporary questions which are hard to answer using conventional methods alone. Creative methods can also be more ethical, helping researchers to address social injustice.

This bestselling book, now in its second edition, is the first to identify and examine the five areas of creative research methods:

• arts-based research

• embodied research

• research using technology

• multi-modal research

• transformative research frameworks.

Written in an accessible, practical and jargon-free style, with reflective questions, boxed text and a companion website to guide student learning, it offers numerous examples of creative methods in practice from around the world. This new edition includes a wealth of new material, with five extra chapters and over 200 new references. Spanning the gulf between academia and practice, this useful book will inform and inspire researchers by showing readers why, when, and how to use creative methods in their research.

Creative Research Methods has been cited over 750 times.

“Inviting the researcher to make the research process attractively creative, Kara extends the scope of the western research tradition, while simultaneously demonstrating rapid growth in the creative research sphere.” Chats Devroop, University of KwaZulu-Natal

"Thank goodness for Helen Kara's work. Written in an easily accessible style, Kara tells it like it is and guides her readers beyond her own text to further reading and exploration. In terms of getting bang for one's buck, this is exactly what a second edition should be - substantively re-worked from the first edition, with considerable new content and chapters." Sharon Inglis, Staffordshire University

"A really insightful book with broad coverage of creative methods, an excellent 'go to' text for students who are considering using creative research methods. I find particularly valuable the inclusion of reflective questions at the end of each chapter, this will encourage students to think about the applications of what they are reading in their own project contexts." Louise Gascoine, Durham University

“In this important volume, Kara provides insight and inspiration regarding ways that we can imagine, create, and emancipate through research methods that take seriously contributions from art, indigenous approaches, and embodiment. Readers will benefit from the book's comprehensive coverage, numerous activities, and core examples to guide practice.” Sarah J. Tracy, Arizona State University

“This is a beautifully crafted one-stop-shop of a book - encyclopaedic in its coverage of creative methods, carefully structured for usability and filled with live examples which provide real world source material for students, academics and practitioners.” Alastair Roy, University of Central Lancashire

“I am excited to see this book in its Second Edition, which builds on the strengths of the first, but expands the matters of creative research methods much further. As with the first edition, the many concrete examples from research projects make this a practical guide for beginner-researchers and an inspiration for the more experienced researchers and research-practitioners. This book is for the 'compulsory' reading list on all research methods modules, and a staple for all social sciences researchers’ personal libraries.” Nicole Brown, UCL Institute of Education

Helen Kara has been an independent researcher since 1999 and specialises in research methods and ethics. She is the author of Research and Evaluation for Busy Students and Practitioners: A Time-Saving Guide (Policy Press, 2nd ed. 2017) and Research Ethics in the Real World: Euro-Western and Indigenous Perspectives (Policy Press, 2018). Helen is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Introducing Creative Research

Creative Research Methods in Practice

Transformative Research Frameworks and Indigenous Research

Creative Research Methods and Ethics

Creative Thinking

Arts-Based and Embodied Data Gathering

Technology-Based and Multi-Modal Data Gathering

Arts-Based and Embodied Data Analysis

Technology-Based and Multi-Modal Data Analysis

Arts-Based and Embodied Research Reporting

Technology-Based and Multi-Modal Research Reporting

Arts-Based and Embodied Presentation

Technology-Based and Multi-Modal Presentation

From Research Into Practice

Understanding Research for Social Policy and Social Work (Second Edition)

Edited by Saul Becker , Alan Bryman and Harry Ferguson

Find out more

Social Research with Children and Young People

By Louca-Mai Brady and Berni Graham

Doing Qualitative Desk-Based Research

By Barbara Bassot

Doing Your Research Project with Documents

By Aimee Grant

Doing Reflexivity

By Jon Dean

Creative Research Methods in Education

By Helen Kara , Narelle Lemon , Dawn Mannay and Megan McPherson

Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism

By Rafe McGregor

Qualitative and Digital Research in Times of Crisis

Edited by Helen Kara and Su-ming Khoo

Narrative Research Now

Edited by Ashley Barnwell and Signe Ravn

Photovoice Reimagined

By Nicole Brown

The Handbook of Creative Data Analysis

Edited by Helen Kara , Dawn Mannay and Alastair Roy

Fiction and Research

By Becky Tipper and Leah Gilman

Doing Phenomenography

By Amanda Taylor-Beswick and Eva Hornung

Encountering the World with I-docs

By Ella Harris

Embedding Young People's Participation in Health Services

Edited by Louca-Mai Brady

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Train Your Brain to Be More Creative

• Bas Korsten

How to get those ideas flowing.

Creativity isn’t inherent. You have to hone it. Here are a few ways to do that, based on neuroscience.

• Engage with nature: Looking at trees and leaves, instead of our electronic devices, reduces our anxiety, lowers our heart rates, soothes us, and allows our brains to make connections more easily.
• Meditate: Meditation clears our minds of jumbled thoughts, and gives our brains the space to observe and reflect, improving task concentration and enhancing our ability to make smart decisions.
• Get moving: Exercising releases endorphins – chemicals our body produces to relieve stress and pain. And when we are less stressed, our brains venture into more fruitful territory.
• Connect with different kinds of people: Diversity makes the brain work harder, by challenging stereotypes.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

I don’t do ruts.

• Bas Korsten is the Global Chief Creative Officer at Wunderman Thompson.

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3 science-based strategies to increase your creativity 

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How can you hack your creativity? 

The term “hacking” has a bad name. It comes out of coding and refers to someone trying to gain control over a computer system, typically for nefarious purposes. The word then morphed a bit, becoming pop culture shorthand for a “quick fix” or a “shortcut.”

None of those definitions apply here. First, the system we’re trying to gain control over is our own neurobiology. Second, when it comes to sustained peak performance, there are no shortcuts.

When I use a term like “hacking” to describe an approach, what I’m really saying is “figuring out how to get your neurobiology to work for you rather than against you.” That’s long been my approach to high achievement.

Here are three science-based strategies to juice your ability to come up with new and creative ideas.

Strategy 1: Befriend your ACC

When researchers talk about creativity, a frequent topic of conversation in the phenomena is known as insight. We’ve all felt it — it’s that experience of sudden comprehension, that aha moment when we get a joke, solve a puzzle or resolve an ambiguous situation.

At the turn of the 21st century, Northwestern neuroscientist Mark Beeman and Drexel University cognitive psychologist John Kounios shed light on this subject. They gave people a series of remote association problems — aka insight problems — and then used  EEG and fMRI to monitor their brains as they tried to solve them.

Remote association problems are word puzzles. Subjects are given three words — for example, pine/crab/sauce — and asked to do one thing: Find a fourth word that complements all of them. (In this case, the answer is “apple,” as in: pineapple, crab apple, and applesauce.)

Some people solve this problem logically, by simply testing one word after another. Others come at it via insight, meaning that the right answer simply pops into mind. A handful of folks blend both strategies.

What Beeman and Kounios uncovered was a noticeable shift in brain function that occurred. Right before people viewed a problem that they’d eventually solve with insight, there was heightened activity in their brain’s anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC plays a role in salience and executive attention, and it’s the part that handles error correction by detecting conflicting signals in the brain.

“This includes alternative strategies for solving a problem,” says Kounios. “The brain can’t use two different strategies at the same time. Some are strongly activated, because they’re the most obvious. And some are weak and only remotely associated to the problem — odd thoughts, longshot ideas. These ideas are the creative ones. When the ACC is activated, it can detect these non-obvious, weakly activated ideas and signal the brain to switch attention to them. That’s an aha moment.”

Beeman and Kounios discovered the ACC lights up when we’re considering off-the-wall ideas.

Which raises a key question: What fires up the ACC? The answer: A good mood.

When we’re in a good mood, the ACC is more sensitive to odd thoughts and strange hunches. In other words, if an active ACC is the ready condition for insight, then a good mood is the ready condition for an active ACC.

The opposite is also true: While a good mood increases creativity, a bad mood amplifies analytical thought. The brain limits our options to the tried and true — the logical, the obvious, the sure thing we know will work.

When we’re in a good mood, we feel safe and secure. We’re able to give the ACC more time to pay attention to weak signals; we’re also more willing to take risks. This matters because creativity is always a little dangerous. New ideas generate problems, and they can be flat-out wrong, tricky to implement and threatening to the establishment.

But this also means we pay a double penalty for negativity. A bad mood not only limits the ACC’s ability to detect those weaker signals; it also limits our willingness to act on the signals that we do detect.

While a good mood is the starting point for heightened creativity, a daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness practice, regular exercise and a good night’s rest remain the best recipe that anyone has yet found for increasing happiness. All four practices are multi-tool creativity boosters that supercharge our abilities to turn the novel into the useful.

Gratitude trains the brain to focus on the positive, altering its normally negatively-biased information-filtering tendencies. This impacts mood, but it also increases novelty — since we’re used to the negative, the positive is often refreshingly different. Gratitude feeds the salience network with more raw material, and the good mood that results gives the default mode network a better shot at using the material to make something startlingly new.

Mindfulness teaches the brain to be calm, focused and nonreactive, amplifying executive attention. But it also puts a little space between thought and feeling and gives the ACC more time to consider alternative, far-flung possibilities.

But what kind of mindfulness training you’re using matters. Divergent thinking requires an open monitoring style of meditation. In open monitoring, instead of trying to ignore thoughts and feelings, you allow them in without judgment.

Exercise  lowers stress levels, flushing cortisol from our system while increasing feel-good neurochemicals, including serotonin, norepinephrine, endorphins  and dopamine. This lowers anxiety, augments our good mood and amps up the ACC’s ability to detect more remote possibilities. Plus, the time-out that exercise provides works as an incubation period.

A good night’s rest provides additional benefits. It increases energy levels, providing resources to meet challenges. The resulting feeling of safety lifts our mood and increases our willingness to take risks, and both amplify creativity. Moreover, sleep is the most critical incubation period of all. When we sleep, the brain has time to find all sorts of hidden connections between ideas.

Gratitude, mindfulness, exercise and sleep are nonnegotiables for sustained peak performance. The nonnegotiable part is key. When life gets complicated, these four practices are often what we remove from our schedule. But when life gets complicated, lean into these practices instead to get the creativity needed to untangle the complicated.

Strategy #2: Understand the importance of non-time and no one

“Non-time” is my term for that vast stretch of emptiness between 4AM (when I start my morning writing session) and 7:30AM (when the rest of the world wakes up). This non-time is a pitch blackness that belongs to no one but me.

The day’s pressing concerns have yet to press, so there’s time for that ultimate luxury: Patience. If a sentence takes two hours to get right, who cares?

Creativity needs this non-time.

Deadlines can often be stressors. Pressure forces the brain to focus on the details, activating the left hemisphere and blocking out that bigger picture. Worse, when pressed, we’re often stressed. We’re unhappy about the hurry, which sours our mood and further tightens our focus. Being time-strapped, then, can be kryptonite for creativity.

We need to build non-time into our schedules. Non-time is time for daydreaming and psychological distancing. Daydreaming switches on the default mode network, enabling our subconscious to find remote associations between ideas. Non-time also gives us a little distance from our problems. That allows us to see things from multiple perspectives, to consider another’s point of view. If we don’t have the time to get that  space from our emotions and take a break from the world, then we won’t have the luxury of alternative possibilities.

And it’s not just non-time — it’s also time spent with no one.

Solitude matters . Certainly a great deal of creativity requires collaboration, but the incubation phase demands the opposite. Taking a break from the sensory bombardment of the world gives your brain even more reason to wander into far-flung corners. A 2012 study run by psychologists at the University of Utah, for example, found that after four days alone in nature, subjects scored 50 percent better on standard tests of creativity.

Try to start your day with 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration. It’s a high-flow bit time that pays significant long-term dividends.

Strategy #3: Think inside the box

“Think outside the box” is how the saying goes, but we might have it backward. Constraints drive creativity — as jazz great Charles Mingus once explained: “You can’t improvise on nothing, man; you’ve gotta improvise on something.”

In studies run at Rider University on the relationship between limits and creativity, students were given eight nouns and asked to use them to write rhyming couplets (the kind that appear in greeting cards). Another group was not given nouns but just told to write rhyming couplets. The work of both groups was then judged for creativity by an independent panel of experts.

Time and again, the participants in the group that started with the constraint of eight nouns outperformed the other group.

The point is that sometimes the blank page is too blank to be useful. That’s why one of my cardinal rules in work is: Always know your starts and your endings. If I have these twin cornerstones in place, whatever goes in between — a book, an article, a speech — is simply about connecting the dots. Without dots to connect, I can get stuck or waste time wandering into tangential territory (which helps explain why my first novel took 11 years to complete).

Important caveat: Many people believe that time constraints — that is, deadlines — are a limit that enables creativity. Maybe. Maybe not.

Earlier, I said that feeling unpressured for time was a key to fostering creativity, and this remains true. Yet it’s also true that deadlines can save creative projects from dragging on indefinitely.

Just set the deadline far enough into the future so you can build long periods of non-time into your schedule. Creative deadlines should be hard enough to make you  stretch, not hard enough to make you snap.

Excerpted from the new book The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer by Steven Kotler . Copyright © 2021 by Steven Kotler. Reprinted by permission of Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Watch his TEDxABQ Talk here: 

About the author

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of nine bestsellers (out of 13 books total), including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 40 languages and appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, WIRED, Atlantic Monthly, TIME and the Harvard Business Review.

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9 Creative Market Research Strategies

to Understand Your Merchandise Buyers

Market research strategies are crucial for any business, but creating them is often complicated and time-consuming. This is why we’ve unfolded 10 creative strategies you can try on your own business! 

What You’ll Find:

• Find Out Who’s Buying Your Products
• Create a Landing Page 
• Test Different Designs
• Look at Your Competition
• Identify the Buying Habits of Your Customer
• Find Out What Makes Them Click
• Measure Which Customers are Most Likely to Purchase
• Use Tools to Make Marketing Easy
• Determine the Best Time of Day to Post

Make Stunning Desings for Your Business Hundreds of Freebies for Your Project! Get Freebies

Researching what product your customers are looking to get from you is an essential marketing strategy. The way customers decide what questions to ask Google is similar to how they decide what to buy next. Buyers have specific requirements and ways of engaging, so make sure you speak their language with these ten creative market research strategies . 

1. Who is Buying Your Products (Every Stage of the Funnel)

Before you can expand your audience or introduce new products, it’s critical to know as much as possible about your merchandise buyers, their preferences, and buying behaviors. Most eCommerce tools and platforms offer a fair amount of insights into this type of demographic data.

In most cases, creating buyer personas will really help you have a clear idea of your buyers. This is a profile of your ideal customer type and the characteristics that make them a part of your target audience.

These personas act as a guide to understanding the person behind the transaction—their preferences, online buying behaviors, and purchase motivations.

Creating buyer personas is not a one-time task; they must be refined and tested over time as your business evolves. Even companies with a modest ad budget can develop split-testing programs to define further and build buyer personas. 

Conducting small test ads in specific zip codes, for instance, or customizing copywriting for a particular gender or age group can help you better understand which audience is most receptive to your message and most likely to make a future purchase. 

This type of analytical data is often included right inside your online store. 

When you monitor and measure the interest people show in your products, where are clicking on your page, and when they finally make the purchase, you can begin to replicate the experience to encourage even more conversions. 

2. Create a Landing Page That’s Perfect for Your Customer

A stand-alone landing page is one of the best marketing tools available to gain insights into what direction your customers want you to take. 

Typically designed with a single call to action, landing pages force users to pick a lane—this or that, if you will.

For instance, a local gym might use a landing page with two buttons—find gym hours and take a class online. 

By measuring the number of clicks on each option, the data will reveal the percentage of website visitors interested in taking an in-person class versus an online class.

Not all landing pages are this binary, of course. 

That’s why many eCommerce companies have multiple landing pages, each designed for a different audience or purpose. The resulting market research helps business owners make informed, data-driven decisions by having various pages and testing those pages for conversion rates. 

3. Test Different Designs

Just as your messaging evolves and requires refinement, your website design elements and landing pages need continuous measurement and improvement. 

However, with the ease of today’s design software, marketers can design without experience. The ability to create a variety of eCommerce assets and landing pages in a variety of different styles is now easier than ever. 

🔥​ Figure out the meaning behind the colors you’re using to evoke the emotions you’re after before finalizing all the designs. 

4. Look at Your Competition

Your competitors are limited only by your imagination. 

Non-traditional adversaries are popping up in the most unexpected places, and they may out-innovate you before you even realize it. In this new era, it’s crucial to know who your competition is and what they offer. 

Before analyzing competitor behavior, you’ll need to define who exactly your competitors are. Competitors may be businesses that sell the same or similar products as you, or they may be companies that your customers choose to support instead of you. 

To accurately assess your competition, you’ll need to think beyond only those companies in your direct line of sight. 

Competitor’s Behavior

Once you’ve zeroed in on your competition, gather information about how they do business so that you can identify gaps in the market and begin to address those gaps with your own merchandising. 

While you’ll want to understand what products your competitors offer, competitive research extends far beyond the products themselves. Other areas to explore (ethically, of course) include:

• Their brand values
• Staffing and future expansion goals
• Products offered in other markets
• How and where does your competitor’s market
• Who they consider their target market to be
• Which keywords their website ranks for

You can typically find this information in collateral materials, websites, online social listening, and talking to the community around the business’ location.

Additionally, keyword research tools like Ahrefs or the free Google Chrome plugin, Keywords Everywhere , make it relatively easy to understand which search terms the companies are targeting and garner the best results.

5. Identify the Buying Habits of Your Customer

Once you have established buyer personas, continuing to enhance those personas with information on buying habits allows you to adapt your marketing strategies accordingly. 

Tools like Ahrefs can help you understand your competitors’ online performance and provide insights into what adjustments you can make on your website. 

While every company should make decisions that are right for their audience and not necessarily attempt to replicate a competitor’s strategy, it’s helpful to consider what’s working in other places. 

Categories like “best-sellers” and even sold-out categories help owners understand what volume of merchandise others are moving and how customers respond. By evaluating this type of data on other websites, you can extract valuable data on which to perform your own testing.

6. Find Out What Makes Them Click

Understanding why merchandise buyers click on an item or pass is critical for increasing conversions (actual purchases) and designing future digital marketing campaigns. 

While standard analytic reports measure how many clicks an item receives and, ultimately, which items convert, a heat map tool is more likely to give you more valuable data.

Review other websites of similar companies and take note of the specific design elements they use. Then, using the data available to you from SEO tools, make some educated assumptions about the correlation between their design choices and their sales.

Are there design features you can emulate in an authentic way that is true to your brand? Can you reorganize how your merchandise is displayed online to increase conversions? 

Finding out what makes customers click is challenging, but through research, testing, and consistency, it’s a creative market research strategy with high returns. 

7. Measure Which Customers Are Most Likely to Purchase

Like most people never get to page two of the Google search results, some online customers never scroll more than a page or two of merchandise. 

This behavior means it’s essential to display your merchandise strategically and be intentional about leading visitors to click through and convert, not just browse. 

The goal is to increase conversion rates (meaning the buyer completes the online purchase) and not simply increase website traffic. Yet, those conversions typically come after a customer has gone through a relatively predictable process:

• A customer searches for a keyword associated with their desired purchase.
• Your website appears in the search results and the potential customer clicks (website traffic)
• A portion of the website visitors scrolls through your online inventory and click on separate product choices (click-through rate)
• One of every ten website visitors makes a purchase (conversion)

It’s tempting to set your sights on growing website traffic since, at each stage, the percentage of engagement declines. It’s logical to assume that increasing your starting traffic numbers by 25% can also increase your conversion rate by the same percentage. However, that’s not often the case. 

High-traffic product pages do not always convert. 

The difference is the buyer’s intention. If you have specific pages that draw many visitors but no buyers, that audience segment is likely at the top of your buying funnel—interested but not ready to purchase. 

However, you may also have pages that draw significantly less traffic but convert at a higher rate—those customers are near the bottom of your funnel. They had likely already done their research and intended to visit your website to make a purchase. 

The type of traffic you attract is often influenced by your other marketing strategies—content marketing, SEO, social media, and more. 

It’s also dependent on your particular niche. If you’re selling to a small, niche audience, those customers are likely to do extensive research before purchasing and, therefore, land on your website when they are near the bottom of the funnel.

On the other hand, if your merchandise is geared more toward a mainstream audience, those marketing efforts are likely to draw “online window shoppers” who have less brand loyalty and make decisions based on price or convenience rather than quality. 

These are all factors to consider as you launch future merchandise. Deciding how specialized your brand should be and which audience makes the most sense are business decisions that impact your bottom line. 

8. Use Tools to Make Merchandise Marketing Easy

SEO tools, heat maps, social media metrics, buyer personas, content marketing plans—using multiple tools to understand your merchandise buyers is necessary and yet sometimes overwhelming. 

MarTech stacks can help make merchandise marketing more manageable, more vertically integrated, and collect valuable data at every stage. These software technology groups simplify your marketing and help with:

• Landing page development
• Split testing
• KPI measurement

HubSpot Marketing Hub incorporates content marketing tools, SEO research , ad management, landing pages, and live chat into one integrated solution. 

Outfunnel is another tool that connects your marketing efforts with your sales data, ensuring continuity between your actions and performance metrics. In addition, it offers integrations with other applications, from email marketing to lead generation and customer follow-up .

9. Determine the Best Time of Day to Post

Sharing your brand and product’s benefits, problem-solving solutions, and unique value proposition on social media is a must for today’s digital marketers.

But, knowing what content to share and when to post is one of the most frequently asked questions from marketing teams . 

While there is no one-right time to post on social media platforms, there are best practices and many ways to test your theories. 

Direct conversion rates from social media posts are often low, but the real value is the collection of valuable engagement signals from your audience.

Tracking how they respond to different advertising campaigns, designs, and messages allows you to continuously research your audience and provide a direct line to give you feedback. 

Luckily, several social media tools are available to help you glean the necessary data and use it to improve your online marketing strategies continuously. 

Sprout Social gives you a high-level overview of all your social media platforms in one glance, perfect for ensuring you have a cohesive and comprehensive campaign. BuzzSumo is another social media tool that makes it easy to track the key metrics around competitor activity.

Final Thoughts

Choose one, a few, or all of the strategies we’ve discussed as an entry point and measure their effectiveness. Many of these creative ideas can be layered, as well. 

Incorporate your buyer personas and design testing into a few landing pages. Devote resources to keyword and competitor research, and then test some of the similar strategies as you launch your next product. 

Ultimately, success will come when you treat your customers well, listen to your audience, and are willing to pivot when necessary.

If you have enjoyed this post you might also want to read our How to Align Your Content & UX Marketing Strategy or our Email Marketing For eCommerce Business: 4 Best Practices to Expand Your Business! post.

Author’s Bio

Darya Jandossova Troncoso is a photographer, artist, and writer working on her first novel and managing a digital marketing blog –  MarketSplash . In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her family, cooking, creating art, and learning everything there is to know about digital marketing.

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• Our Approach

Creative Strategy Guide: Best Practices for Business Growth

If you find yourself scrutinizing your ads and questioning their performance, the culprit might be your creative. Have you ever pondered why certain ads outshine others or why one format yields success while another falls flat? We have too.

The demand for better, more  measurable ROAS  is understandably driving advertising budgets towards digital media channels, which is where performance data comes standard. Here all creative can be considered  performance marketing , enabling us to transform insights into strategies that drive more cost-effective ad spend across platforms.

In this article, we will break down what creative strategy means and how it is an overlooked but powerful tool in maximizing your ROI. Discover how creative strategy can empower you to optimize your returns through more efficient messaging that resonates with your audience.

What is a Creative Strategy?

A creative strategy is an organized plan of action for deploying an idea or creative platform. This helps brands develop content in a consistent and methodical way that supports specific KPIs and facilitates overall business growth.

It consists of three major parts: the platform itself (what the idea is for solving a business problem), communication orchestration (where and how pieces of the campaign click together) and tactics (what the specific ad unit executions should look like). 

Creative Strategy vs. Creative Brief

Creative strategy and a traditional creative brief are similar but different. While creative briefs are often seen as perfunctory documents containing target audience information, product value propositions, and specifications; creative strategy blends traditional briefing with insights and relevant industry research to build upon past performance and audience trends. 

In short, creative briefs outline what you need, and creative strategy focuses on how you will make it resonate.

Why is it Important to Implement a Creative Strategy?

Without a creative strategy, your ads may not be any different or distinguishable from your competitors. Creative strategy addresses the “why us, why now” aspects of a message. 

Business Insider  conducted an experiment on  TikTok  to see how many ads they encountered in a two-hour scroll; the results revealed 140 ads within 500 videos during the scrolling period. As you might imagine, viewers will only remember a handful of these ads, and an even smaller number actually purchase anything. 

According to  Nielsen , great creative is the best way to ensure your ad leads to that coveted purchase. One of their studies found that creative was the largest factor (47%) driving ROI and sales over any other advertising element. In an internet full of competing messages, having a good creative strategy is imperative to ensure your messaging reaches your audience and stands out in the sea of sameness.

Across our routines, we are exposed to thousands of ads a day in various formats from billboards, podcast sponsorships, affiliate content, Meta, TikTok,  Reddit , Google… the list goes on. Out of all the messages and marketing, how will your brand use its spend and bandwidth efficiently?

6 Best Practices When Developing a Creative Strategy

Now that we see how vital creative strategy is to improving our ROI, how do we make sure we know how to build a strategy that is effective? Below, we will break down our best practices for crafting a creative strategy that drives results.

1. Define Your Goals and KPIs

Determine the business outcome you are most interested in improving. For example, are you looking to increase awareness or boost sales? If you are aiming to increase awareness, what does success look like? For awareness, you might be seeking a certain CPM, impression share, etc. Success might look like decreasing your CPMs by X%.

Having defined goals and KPIs to aim for will help measure the creative’s success and inform the messaging strategy based on where it falls in the funnel.

2. Find Your Target Audience

In order to create copy and imagery that resonates most with the audience, we need to define whom we are trying to reach and add any research about what they currently know or think of our brand. This piece is critical to consider any audience barriers, motivators, or preferences so we can customize our creative to speak most effectively to the main audience.

Tip: Stick to a maximum of 2-3 key audiences to ensure your message isn’t too broad and watered down.

3. Look Back at Prior Performance and Research Competitors

When it comes to creative strategy, looking at past performance is crucial for determining how to move forward and build upon what we know. If you have not done a lot of  creative testing  up to this point, you can still learn directionally from what worked or didn’t in the last few months.

Take a look at 3-5 top and bottom performers based on the same key KPI and audience you are trying to reach for this project. It can also be helpful to take a look at what your competitors are doing and summarize your findings to help distinguish your message and answer any comparison questions before the audience seeks them out.

4. Break Down Your Advertising Campaign by Deliverable and Funnel Position

Include important nuances and specs for your production team so that each creative is right-sized for the platform. Ideally, you want to create messaging for the platform vs. resizing from one and retrofitting for all others. This is also a good place to remind them of where each deliverable will live in the funnel or campaign so the messaging fits the desired action.

Here is where you can start to assign specific tests to iterate on within the campaign to learn how your audience reacts to certain creative elements.

5. Right-Sizing The Strategy Against Your Budget

Once you have the creative strategy, asset mix, specs, and testing planned, you will need to determine what budget is best to fit the number of assets for the period of time you want them to run.

If you have a smaller budget, you may want to pare back the number of assets and tests you run at one time to make sure enough spend gets to the test versions. If you have a large budget, it might be a good time to play with more intentional tests and determine which channels need the most support.

6. Determine Your Ideal Timeline

Now that you know what, how, and why you want to produce new creative, determine when you need it and how long it will take to be ready to launch. Sometimes the best plan is the simplest. If time doesn’t allow for multiple tests, prioritize the most impactful variations and plan accordingly.

Your timeline should include any content refreshes you expect based on channel fatigue. For example, if your campaign is running on TikTok, you may want to stagger your creative so you can refresh it more often throughout your flight.

7. Gather Insights and Repeat

Once the project is kicked off and your creative is live, the process is just beginning. In order to build upon your creative strategy for the next time, keep a pulse on the performance throughout your campaign run and recommend any adjustments as needed to the creative to boost performance. Once the campaign wraps, collect data and analyze which variations were winners and what you should hold off on and test again at a later date. Iterate and repeat the process.

The right  creative agency  should help guide the messaging and formats that will work hardest for each channel and placement based on facts and performance, not guesswork. By analyzing past performance, marketing teams can learn what messages, media types, and imagery led to improved KPIs performance while tailoring their approach for the next creative campaign. Strategic messaging, testing, and insights are absolutely imperative when forming a plan for creative that delivers real results and pushes past the clutter.

With new platforms and ad types popping up daily, a well-crafted creative strategy is necessary to keep from falling behind your competitors. As we discussed, creating effective ads goes beyond where you put them and how much you spend; it relies on the balance of art and science. Creative strategy will allow you to define your goals, understand your target audience deeper and harness insights from you and your competitors past performance. 

But the job doesn’t end with creative execution. Creative strategy relies on continuous adaptation and iteration to find the right message and format for your brand. Just as the platforms and mediums evolve, so must our approach to our creative. Creative strategy is all about looking deeper, digging into the data and ultimately making sure your creative drives the coveted return on investment. 

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Research on Cantonese Cultural and Creative Product Design Strategy Based on Fuzzy Kano Model

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From the perspective of consumers, the paper identifies the design requirement attributes of Cantonese cultural and creative products based on the fuzzy Kano model. On the basis of the preliminary in-depth interview method, the fuzzy Kano model is constructed to classify consumer needs according to five demand attributes. According to the results of the fuzzy Kano model, the Better-Worse coefficients for different types of needs are calculated. Combined with the four quadrant model to rank the importance, the paper proposed corresponding design strategies for Cantonese cultural and creative products. The aim is to provide a theoretical basis and design basis for Cantonese cultural and creative product design and other tourism cultural and creative product designs.

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Zhong, X. (2024). Research on Cantonese Cultural and Creative Product Design Strategy Based on Fuzzy Kano Model. In: Cao, BY., Wang, SF., Nasseri, H., Zhong, YB. (eds) Intelligent Systems and Computing. ICFIE 2022. Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol 207. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-2891-6_10

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Arm Q4 2024 Earnings: Positives, Negatives, and Investors Questions

May 9, 2024 / ben bajarin.

Key Takeaways

• Strong Revenue Growth and Future Confidence
• Continued Strategic Expansion into Multiple Markets
• Investment in Advanced Technologies and Ecosystem

What’s Significant

Arm Holdings plc reported a significant year-over-year revenue growth of 47% , reaching $928 million in Q4 FYE24, driven by record royalty revenue and strong growth in license revenue. The CEO Rene Haas expressed confidence in sustaining this growth trajectory, highlighting the successful adoption of Armv9, gains in the automotive and cloud sectors, and the impact of AI on licensing activity.

The company’s expansion into various markets such as infrastructure, automotive, client PCs, and smartphones, alongside the AI tailwind, has been a key factor in its unprecedented growth. The Haas’ remarks underscored the validation of Arm’s strategic directions laid out in previous years, now coming to fruition and significantly contributing to the company’s performance and outlook

Arm’s focus on developing and licensing advanced technologies, such as the Armv9 architecture and Compute Subsystems, is paying off with increased adoption across different segments. The company’s efforts to grow its ecosystem, evidenced by the increase in Arm Total Access and Flexible Access licenses, are enhancing its market position and setting the stage for long-term growth. This strategic investment in technology and partnerships is expected to drive Arm’s revenue and market share expansion in the coming year.

• Revenue Growth: Arm experienced a significant revenue growth of 47% year-over-year, with total revenue increasing from $633 million in Q4 FYE23 to $928 million in Q4 FYE24. FQ424 royalties increased 37% YoY and 9% QoQ on higher mix of Arm v9 in smartphones and gains in auto and cloud.
• Operating Margin Improvement: The non-GAAP operating margin saw a substantial improvement, going from (-0.2%) in Q4 FYE23 to 42.1% in Q4 FYE24, indicating a strong operational efficiency.
• Free Cash Flow Increase: Non-GAAP free cash flow increased by 40% year-over-year, from $454 million in Q4 FYE23 to $637 million in Q4 FYE24, demonstrating robust cash generation capabilities.
• Expansion in Access Licenses: Arm expanded its Total Access licenses to 31, up from 18 in Q4 FYE23, and its Flexible Access licenses to 222, up from 203, indicating a growing ecosystem and customer base.
• Operating Expenses Increase: GAAP operating expenses increased by 32% year-over-year, from $656 million in Q4 FYE23 to $865 million in Q4 FYE24, reflecting higher costs associated with scaling and investment in growth.
• Diluted Earnings Per Share (EPS): While there was an improvement, the diluted EPS on a GAAP basis was only $0.21 in Q4 FYE24, which, despite being an improvement from $0.00 in Q4 FYE23, suggests there is room for growth in profitability.
• Cost of Sales Increase: The cost of sales on a GAAP basis increased by 52% year-over-year, from $27 million in Q4 FYE23 to $41 million in Q4 FYE24, indicating rising costs that could impact gross margins if not managed.
• Share-Based Compensation (SBC) Costs: The total SBC cost (equity-settled) was $186 million in Q4 FYE24, contributing significantly to operating expenses and impacting the bottom line.
• Decrease in Chips Shipped: There was a 10% decrease in chips reported as shipped, from 7.8 billion in Q4 FYE23 to 7.0 billion in Q4 FYE24, which could indicate demand fluctuations or supply chain challenges.

Main Investor Questions

• Licensing Revenue and Market Entry: Investors were interested in the sustainability of the strong licensing revenue and Arm’s position as the logical choice for partners entering markets requiring AI, rich application ecosystem support, and broad OS support.
• Recovery in China’s Handset Market: There was curiosity about the recovery observed in China’s handset market, its impact on Arm’s revenues, and how shifts in consumer buying patterns between Chinese and non-Chinese producers affected royalty revenues.
• Arm v8 to v9 Conversion Rate: Questions were raised about the conversion rate from v8 to v9 architecture, especially in the context of the infrastructure business and premium handset segment, and how this conversion impacts revenue growth projections.
• Sequential Decline in Revenue: Investors sought clarification on the drivers behind the 7% sequential decline in revenue, particularly in networking, industrial, and IoT sectors, and how these trends might affect future growth.
• Infrastructure Business and Cloud Side Growth: There was interest in the growth trajectory of Arm’s infrastructure business, specifically in the cloud segment, and whether the design wins from hyperscaler customers were in line with or exceeding initial market share growth projections made during the IPO process.

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