Creativity and the semantics of value creation

What does creating value really mean in creative professional work, what does it look like, and how do you actually do it?

In business nomenclature value creation is taking certain inputs, like resources and capital, and making them into outputs that have value like units sold and profits. For creative agencies, value creation can be a pretty abstract idea because what we often make — brands, creative marketing ideas, communications, and the like — is not concretely tied to an output or metric that can be measured like profits.

For creative work, value creation boils down to helping clients to become a better and more successful business through improved tools for verbal and visual storytelling. To get there, we have to balance what a client really needs and what our agency teams can actually do.

What often gets in the way is when our mindset for how to focus their expertise doesn’t align with what truly helps clients tell authentic and compelling stories. Below, I explore common areas of misalignment and offer ideas to help realign and get back on track.

Salience bias is our achilles heel

In psychology, Salience refers to stimuli that stands out for the rest. It’s similar to the idea of availability bias where human beings tend to focus on ideas and information that are the most emotionally compelling or vivid to us.

As people, our own subjective preferences for what is interesting or compelling tends to naturally overshadow other things. We often over index on what we think is right, cool, interesting, or most often, what we are good at.

In the context of value creation, when the salience bias of an agency leader (Creative Director, Strategist, Designer, Manager) and the client deciders are not aligned, this can produce friction, lack of understanding, and a great deal of project risk.

For a project sense-maker on the agency side, one must look deep within and measure one’s salience bias against the client value creation the project needs to achieve. To succeed, we have to put our natural impulses in check and put ourselves in the shoes of the client. Creative people do not like to do this because the proverbial creative footwear is often ill fitting, old, or just not our style.

So we have a problem when what the client really needs is not what we really want to do even if it may be the right thing to do. When we run into this problem, we’re in need of a mind shift and a vibe shift. We must adjust how we frame our own subjective impulses to better measure them against what will actually be of the most benefit for a project and will align with the knowledge, vocabulary, and ways of working that are the most familiar and effective for the client team.

Practicing aesthetic detachment

In meditation, one seeks to be in the present moment and observe your thoughts, external stimuli and feelings as appearances in consciousness with no judgement measured toward them. In client work, creative people have a hard time stepping outside of their own minds to more objectively observe what is happening.

As we consider how creative people bring value to client projects, we tend to focus most on skill sets and expertise. At the heart of what is being done is a financial transaction — creative services in exchange for specific deliverables for a specified budget over time. When articulated in this way, there is no real magic. Once a scope of work is inked, it is the client experience (the dialogue, collaboration, and the thinking) and the work created together that is the mystical fuel for project success.

As we work through a client project, one must actively work to have a kind of observational equilibrium from moment to moment so that we can keep everyone on the same track conceptually, creatively, and behaviorally.

To achieve this equilibrium, one needs to foster a deliberate aesthetic detachment to what is being done. This detachment is not at the expense of quality or sophistication, but rather one is actively working to separate what you individually believe is formally cool, most interesting or “the right way” from what you are actually experiencing in the project.

The term “The way it should be-ness” attributed to Ray and Charles Eames embodies this idea that the end goal of true value creation is a harmony between form and function, and not that one person’s idea of what is right wins.

Crafting a Vernacular of Relevance

As creatives, what we are all searching for when it comes to value creation is zeroing in on what I refer to as a Vernacular of Relevance. What this means is you are working to find where your subjective formal ideas, the needs of the client, the project, and the level of formal understanding the client leaders have all operate at the same frequency.

I was once working on an enterprise project for a global brand. The challenge we faced was that the client leaders that needed to buy off on the work were not designers, so they did not have the tools to fully understand our point of view and approach. The work, while great, became confusing to them because there was no vernacular of relevance.

With a little reworking of how the presentation unfolded, and some adjustments to make the work more familiar to them, we were able to gain approval to move forward. Some may argue that perhaps the work was compromised to sell it in but this point of view negates the primary thesis for doing the work in the first place — client value creation.

No matter how amazing, progressive, visually stimulating, sophisticated, or better a piece of work is, if a client team doesn’t get it, embrace it, and understand how it successfully solves their problem, then to them no value has actually been created. An incredibly executed wrong idea is still a wrong idea.

Every person on an agency team should be aware that a vernacular of relevance needs to be reached for a project to succeed. The mental shift that is required is moving from the natural impulse to lean into the creative patterns and ways of working that we know well to asking where things don’t quite fit and what kinds of flexibility in articulation, thinking, and designing are needed to align with the client’s point of view and to help them better see ours as well.

Embracing the client conundrum

When it comes to creative value creation for clients, we can often conflate what the client needs and what the agency needs. As creative services companies perpetually confront how to maintain a sustainable business, financial and resourcing demands inevitably become the primary focus.

As psychology tells us, what we think about and focus on influences our actions and vice versa. A smile presupposes the positive, a frown the negative. Similarly, if one’s primary focus is money, people, and margin, then client value creation will naturally become overshadowed in the day to day mindset.

I love the age old metaphor that an automobile is not designed and constructed to consume gasoline but it is purpose built to take you to a destination. Similarly, a creative agency is not made to staff people and generate revenue but purpose built to get a client to a new destination.

For a project to go well, you have to continually remind yourself why the project is happening and the unique circumstances that you are operating in. Client’s more often than not need education and far more context for how you are going to create value for them. To win in the slipstream of ongoing projects, it’s about having an acute ability to measure what you prefer against the nuanced realities of what the client expects and needs.

Getting back to the why

As a creative person who wants to author and control the aesthetic end product, we can begin to only focus on the parts of the project that are most striking and interesting to us, while avoiding or ignoring the other parts. This can become especially problematic when there is a client relationship to foster, a scope of work, money, and people’s livelihood at stake. One’s desire to fit things into your salience bias can produce friction, confusion, and client disappointment that can end up poisoning the well.

Defending one’s salience bias, be it creative, financial or otherwise, can begin to fill the room, cloud the discussion, and grind the project to a halt. There can be a degree of ego supported by the way in which you frame a creative argument that ultimately, despite good intentions, becomes counter productive.

When we consider the semantics of value creation, we have to get over our own inner monologue and look at the project from above, evaluate the activities that are transpiring through the mindset of our client partners, and work hard to not fall back on cynicism or salience bias so that everything we are doing makes sense. It’s this balance of deeply embracing the client’s mindset, creative detachment, and critical thinking that is the recipe for success.

As a creative I’ve been on every side of this challenge. I’ve had clients that were on totally the same wavelength as our team, pushing the work, and shooting for the same outcome. I’ve had clients get the equivalent of a creative Ferrari that had no idea what they were even looking at. And I’ve had clients that were tough to work with and required a great deal of education and spirited revision to ensure we got to a good place.

As we consider our current cultural moment encompassing immense political, cultural, ecological, and technological change, creative value creation is ultimately about stepping out of our own way to maintain a vernacular of relevance to moves us collectively forward in productive directions in our creative work and life.

Will Hall, Thanks for the pre-read feedback.

Subscribe here to be notified when I publish.

Buy the book! A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity and the Business of Design.

Interested in brand innovation? Check out Athletics

Interested in upstream creative planning championed by experts? check out Preseason