Understanding the Need of Creativity in PR

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Today I’m very happy to present 99th Blog “Understanding the Need of Creativity in PR”.

Friends, everyone is creative, but we have different styles of how we do our creativity. Being creative is one of the important skills in Public Relations to stand-out from the crowd, achieve cut-through and deliver inspiring communication.

To be creative is a process involving the creation of idea(s) and solution(s) using diverse method(s) such as brainstorming, storyboarding, brain dumping, mind mapping, sketching, provocation, analogies etc. that emphasizes access to both the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. The amazing human mind’s alpha state is very supportive when creativity is required. It prioritizes relaxation, playfulness, new habits, curiosity, and ideation that facilitate creativity. 

Friends, ideation is a key element of creative PR that allows PROS to dive into an ocean of ideas, pushes boundaries, and explores all possibilities. Ideation involves the following:

• A passionate questioning of the status quo
• Innovative thinking behind every task and strategy
• Identifying different kinds of assets, particularly visual assets, that sufficiently support the campaign
• Conveying the brand’s message and story in a way that strikes a note with the target audience.
• Ideation ensures that every PR campaign’s assets are relevant and trigger the necessary emotions to prompt the needed reactions.

  

Creativity does not belong to the world of advertising only; in fact today, it is an important element to any form of marketing communication including public relations. Creative PR or creativity in a communication or set of communications is easily noticeable, understood and can create a distinctive impact on the intended target audience.

Creativity in public relations is the perfect convergence between the “what to say” and the “how to say it”: a message that is in sync with the issue at hand as well as relevant to its target audience and crafted in such a way that gets the distinction, the attention, the awe, the interest, the sympathy culminating in a desire to participate and engage in.

PR is all about communicating between a brand with its stakeholders as well as public in general, communication that is intended to shape the reputation of a brand and create a satisfied and participative audience at the other end. Communication that can spark enthusiasm, create engagement and a feeling of accomplishment for all sides. For a communication to be participated by all sides, it must like any other communication be crafted creatively.

We’re living in a time where we are blessed with new technology innovations so that we can have the luxury to the freedom of information, the choices of communication mediums and in touch with one another across the world in more convenient ways. Imagine you need to communicate a message to such a person in such an environment competing with others trying to win a spot in her or his mind and hopefully get the brain’s algorithm going in your favor.

Creativity is endless and as long as people communicate, PR campaign would always require a unique way to inter-communicate, an unexpected and distinctive way of campaigning and executed it abruptly so that people will never get tired of seeing and listening and participating. Without creativity, PR would only be seen as image building, reputation maker and all those things in between that will make people only read headlines.

PR and creativity have been linked since the beginning of the profession as evidenced by the creative campaigns of Edward Bernays, father of modern PR. His professional career was marked by some of the memorable campaigns that are still considered the most creative PR campaigns.

Today, in the globalized twenty-first century, when the world is exposed to a variety of mediums of communications, messages and events, it is becoming challenging how to successfully attract the attention of the target public. PR depends on the development of technology and human consciousness, and creativity is imposed here as a very desirable element in communication with the public. Moreover, today, we are especially focused on creativity to get the attention of the public and the media. The PR agencies are facing this challenge on a daily basis, wanting to overcome the challenges of successfully capturing the attention of the target public and media, and increasingly relying on creativity as the so-called attention catcher. Therefore, the PROS are required to bring creativity to the way of communicating, presenting key messages, and achieving communication goals. For that reason, creativity is becoming an essential strategic and tactical tool for shifting the task to a higher level.

Creativity is one of the most commonly used words today, but what is creativity? Sometimes creativity is easier to recognize than to define, but it is certainly something we can call “thinking outside the box.” Andy Green – Author of “Creativity in Public Relations” and a leading expert on communications and creativity, states if we want to understand meaning of word “creativity,” we need to observe creativity as an individual talent, as a process, as a product, and as a recognition by others. Among numerous definitions and different approaches to defining creativity, Andy Green gives his own definition for PROS, and it is as follows:

Creativity is the ability each of us has to create something new by bringing together two or more different elements in a new context, in order to provide added value to task.

A creative act consists of not only originating but also evaluating the added value it contributes. It is not novelty for its own sake, but it must produce some form of value that can be recognized by a third party.

In order for creativity to be successfully applied in PR activities, it is necessary to know the context under which it develops. Moreover, something that is creative and interesting for one target audience does not mean that it will be creative for another audience. Therefore, creativity in PR requires that it be re-examined each time. Also, creativity is not inventing something completely new, but innovatively presenting something existing in a different and hitherto unseen way. So we can say that creativity in PR uses existing content that it just re-packaged and presented in a different form, which ultimately results in achieving communication goals such as attracting the attention of the public and the media.

To conclude; according to Levinson (2002) if “in art creativity is meant to cultivate, to enchant, to touché the soul,” creativity in PR is supposed to earn trust, to add value, to change the attitude, behavior, and beliefs of the company’s publics. In order to achieve all above on creative way, PROS need to use some of activities as such as brainstorming, ideas’ evaluation, idea-stimulating techniques, surveys, etc... All these activities require time and elaboration, so we can also consider it as a creative process. Therefore, some of research studies on the connection between mindfulness and creativity confirmed that mindfulness may be related to creativity, originality, and flexible thinking.

Thank you for reading the blog.

 

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