Curation
Concepts or ideas
alone don’t result in a Creative Business Transformation.
When a leader has successfully recognised creative triggers and has pushed promising ideas forward, these ideas should be made, they should be created. This requires curation – a process for selecting, refining, and evolving concepts into measurable and differentiating strategies.
LIONS and Deloitte Digital’s research shows leaders have done this by:
1.
Being accountable themselves while empowering teammates that specialise in shaping ideas – this often needs a leader who can deal with organisational red tape so their talent does not have to.
2.
A data-based method for identifying unmet or insufficiently met customer and market needs.
#WOMBSTORIES | ESSITY
AMV BBDO, LONDON
GRAND PRIX, TITANIUM LIONS
2021
Anton Vincent, President of Mars Wrigley North America, understands this stage of the Creative Business Transformation process is crucial for obtaining the financial outcomes that come later. According to Vincent:
“Sometimes people get too focused on the financial elements before putting in the work that produces the financial outcome. The very first thing we do is make sure that we stay true to our roots of being great consumer scientists. Having great consumer insight, making sure the insight is the foundation for building strategy, building execution plans for the strategy and then executing those plans all the way through the transformation process.”
Anton Vincent
President | Mars Wrigley North America
Curation to Implementation
Turning promise into value
Ideas can be curated by a single group or function, but it typically takes the resources and backing of the full organisation to reach the heights of Creative Business Transformation. During the transition from Curation to Implementation, a creative leader is usually needed to get buy-in at the highest levels of the organisation and to attract collaborators to implement curated ideas. By telling emotional, data-backed stories, effective leaders can align the C-suite on common metrics and goals while inspiring decision-makers at all levels to apply creativity to their disciplines.
Consider the following strategies some effective creative leaders are already employing to gain this alignment:
1. Inspire creativity by connecting at a human level.
Esi Eggleston Bracey, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Unilever, inspires teams to connect with people at a human level to create desirable, unmissable, and superior brands.
“Growth Marketing is a team sport. It is rooted in discovering and anticipating human needs that may not be obvious on the surface. You’ve got to think of a person, not just someone who you want to sell something to. The curiosity to understand people at a human level inspires innovation and enables us to create propositions that super-serve people’s needs, breaking previous barriers to addressing them, and engineering solutions that accelerate growth for the business.”
Esi Eggleston Bracey
Chief Growth Officer and CMO | Unilever
The change has been a positive one for Unilever’s bottom line as well. After decreasing over the prior five-year period, annual revenue increased in consecutive years starting in 2021, including an increase of nearly 15% in 2022. 12
For Jane Wakely, Chief Marketing Officer at PepsiCo, turning ideas into a meaningful transformation is about moving people.
"A big difference between transformations that are successful and those that are failures is whether you manage to move people. You need to paint a bold vision to inspire people and take them with you.”
Jane Wakely
Chief Marketing Officer | PepsiCo
PepsiCo’s “Lays Smart Farm” shows this in practice. It’s a real-time monitoring app that uses satellite imagery and remote sensing, along with machine learning models, to create an early warning system giving farmers predictive actionable insights around crop health. 13
The innovation was possible because of the hard work of a cross-functional team. To engage such a big group and convince people to dedicate time and energy, they needed to dream about what a better future could look like first. Which brings us onto the transition into the next phase, implementation.
2. Structure collaboration for agility and impact.
According to Anton Vincent, President of Mars Wrigley North America, creative collaboration can be maximised when the most influential people are involved, but only if there is clearly defined decision-making authority.
“You can be more efficient (with fewer people in the room), but you have to be smart about who they are. I have also come to appreciate clear governance… A strategic layer and an operational layer working together with a strong leader will make for a good transformation experience.”
For Vincent, this setup could involve internal or external partners provided the core team has “purview over the entire transformation and has an enterprise view of all the pieces and where it's going”.