The Reason for Invoking The Muse: Summer rolled around and it was once again time to create the annual benefit enrollment materials. The client needed some fresh new overarching concepts that would highlight and encourage enrollment to employees—who needed to understand their benefit options and make appropriate decisions for themselves and their families.

The Deliverable: A Benefits Campaign Concept Deck

Armed with the understanding that some people find open enrollment a bit stressful, each concept presented offered a unique theme designed to increase anticipation and generate excitement. As a litmus test for big thinking, each concept also had to be robust enough to easily generate a plethora of engaging headlines and striking, fun visuals. If you can find ways to entertain your audience while you educate them, your rate of engagement and response will go up. And so will your ROI.

The Deliverable: A Brand Audit, Competitive Audit, and a Brand Opportunities Document

Information is power. Through the process of creating a brand audit, I was able to study their website, social media presence, and marketing collateral at a granular level. Then I applied that same detailed investigative approach to their top three competitors’ brands. When both audits were compared side-by-side, I was able to identify key opportunities that their brand could seize and leverage as valuable points of differentiation.

When your brand is designed to stand out in the marketplace (and not just fit in), you will attract more customers, and your response rates and ROI will naturally increase.

(When I have provided this service for my clients, they have always been very appreciative. So much so that sometimes they have even surprised me with chocolates and flowers. True story.)

The Reason for Invoking The Muse: The CEO and founder of ASU, Kendrick Shope, desired to make the private facebook group created to support her students, an even stronger “community” where members would want to come, spend time, and interact with each other often.

The Deliverable: Online Community Engagement Research & Ideation Document

Step one of this project, like all creative projects, was to research and gather as much information as possible. I spent a considerable amount of time observing the Facebook group’s use and interactivity. I then began researching the functions of a successful community, to determine where there were opportunities for improvement within the existing ASU facebook group. It was only then, armed with the proper knowledge and insights that I began brainstorming potential solutions.

Brainstorming and concepting is a whole brain process involving both strategic and creative thinking. You cannot have successful significant outcomes unless your creative solutions are generated from sound strategic insights.

The Reason for Invoking The Muse: The client needed unique, out-of-the-box ideas for the focal point of the lobby in their Palo Alto office. The only requirement was that it had to somehow express their brand’s attributes of innovation, precision, artistry, and technological connectivity, while showcasing their logo.

The Deliverable: AT&T Foundry Lobby Focal Point Concepts Deck

A dozen eye-catching suggestions were presented to the client in the form of a deck with a brief concept overview. This included sketches of what the space would conceivably look like and photography references to help explain and visualize the end result.

Pie-in-the-sky thinking done early on encourages a range of ideas and creative possibilities to manifest. This “big brand thinking” offers lots of flexibility and carries with it more opportunities to make a huge impact. You can always scale a great idea down if needed, but it’s awfully hard to take a weak one-off idea and try to force it to be something it’s not. Think big first.

The Reason for Invoking The Muse: As The Creativity and MidLife Transformation Coach, I find myself spending more and more time kick-starting my clients’ creative thinking with a myriad of varied ideas and suggestions. This comes very easily to me and I’m happy to do it. Quite often I’ve been asked by clients and friends who know that I have this skill set, if they can hire me to do their brainstorming for them. This had happened enough times that it became clear there is a demand for this type of ideation service. I just needed to outline the specifics of the service I was going to provide.

The Deliverable: A Mind Map

Mind Mapping is a quick brainstorming exercise that I use often when I want to categorize, highlight, and analyze information while identifying as many connections as possible. Here I used it to ascertain my potential clients’ needs that as The Creative Muse I could fulfill, the types of projects that I might best be able to help them with, and the benefits they would receive in working with me.

The Reason for Invoking The Muse: After running a very successful long-standing campaign called, Hungry Today, NTFB wanted to explore some new campaign concepts.

The Deliverable: North Texas Food Bank Campaign Concepts with Billboard Ad Applications

No matter the client or the medium, when concepting ad campaigns certain barometers for success always hold true. The idea has to be arresting, clever, quick to comprehend, and affect the desired response. And in the case of billboards placed along busy interstates and highways, you only get about five seconds to make that kind of impact.

The Reason for Invoking The Muse: After completing the extensive work required to get a new brick and mortar business up and running, the owners of The Cajun Market realized that they had not yet given much thought to the many various ways they could market their brand beyond social media. They were also interested in the possibilities of generating additional revenue beyond selling ready-made food and grocery items. They had some ideas, but desired a solid strategy and specifics from someone with both a creative and marketing background.

The Deliverable: The Cajun Market Brand Extension List

This document outlined and prioritized which branding and marketing projects to tackle first, second, and third as their budget would allow. It also supplied them with numerous marketing ideas such as in-store signage and ads, events, seasonal promotions, exclusive branded products, themed gift baskets, offsite Cajun Market hosted experiences, gift certificates, etc.

As a business owner it’s important to envision all future possibilities early on, so that you can create a brand and marketing system robust enough to support all of your dreams.

The Reason for Invoking The Muse: HP was implementing a new and improved employee social learning platform to replace their existing one called, “Brain Candy”. Both tools were designed to improve HP employees’ learning experience and help them master their roles. HP was considering a rebrand, and asked for naming options that focused on themes such as growth, technology, social learning, networking, collaboration, global knowledge sharing, career opportunities and advancement, and innovation.

The Deliverable: An Extensive List of Possible Platform Names

What’s in a name? Everything. It has to represent your brand’s personality while communicating the key benefit or identifying attribute of the product or service you’re naming. In this scenario, the client needed to see a lot of options in order for the decision makers to come to a consensus, so pages of ideas were delivered. Each naming option submitted met the criteria outlined in the creative brief supplied by the client.