While your creative point of view is informing your larger creative vision, innovation also requires understanding what already exists and why.
Studying competitors and identifying category standards provide important information about what brands have established, what consumers already recognize and expect, and how the market operates. Brand and product benchmarks give you points of comparison for understanding what has already demonstrated success within that reality.
However, when considered against your larger creative vision, how you use those benchmarks has to change.
Successful innovation can easily become something to replicate. Once something demonstrates success, it can become a formula for what to create next. But replicating what has already been established can restrict what you are capable of imagining.
Understanding the relationships within those standards and benchmarks can provide reference points for developing your own creative benchmarks in relation to your creative vision.
Standards Exist for a Reason
A standard establishes what is expected within a category or market. A benchmark gives you a level of quality or achievement for comparison within that established reality.
In innovation, both provide useful information. Category standards can tell you what consumers already recognize and expect, along with the conventions, criteria, and constraints of the market. Brand and product benchmarks can show you how others have successfully operated within or interpreted those standards.
That information should not be ignored for the sake of originality. Trying to create something new does not make what has already been established disappear.
The creative opportunity comes from understanding why the standard exists, then determining what within it needs to be retained and what is open to your own interpretation.
Understanding the Standard Means Understanding the Relationship
Acne care is a great example. Established brands have historically used red in their visual identity.
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how people create and interpret meaning through communication. Color is one of those visual signals. In Western cultures, red is commonly associated with attention, warning, and urgency. However, in other cultures, red can communicate different meanings, making the market important to how that signal is understood.
Within acne care, red makes sense. A breakout can draw unwanted attention to the skin. Using red in an acne-care brand can reinforce the relationship between the urgency of the pain point and the consumer need to address it.
Hero Cosmetics initially used red prominently for its Mighty Patch™ Original Patch, framing the product around coming to the rescue of a blemish. The color reinforces that product proposition.
However, acne care does not have to be understood through urgency alone.
The Same Problem Can Support Different Creative Expressions
Emerging acne-care brands demonstrate different ways of interpreting the relationship between the consumer and the same pain point.
Blue, for example, is associated with calm, trust, and stability. Within acne care, those associations can shift the relationship away from urgency and toward a calmer approach to the same concern. The consumer still recognizes that the product addresses acne, but the visual identity communicates a different relationship to the experience.
Green offers another interpretation. Its associations with nature, growth, and renewal can support a gentler approach to the same concern. The visual identity can evoke those associations while the product still operates within the claims the category allows.
Starface reframes the relationship further.
Its yellow and black visual identity and star-shaped patches do not treat a pimple exclusively as something that should disappear from view. Yellow’s associations with optimism and energy support a brand experience that makes the treatment deliberately visible.
The patch performs the recognizable job of treating a blemish, while the brand gives that visibility a different meaning within the experience.
None of these interpretations requires the consumer to forget what acne is or abandon what they already understand about the problem. The same consumer pain point can support different creative expressions depending on the relationship the brand wants to establish between the consumer and the problem.
Understanding what the established standard is communicating gives your imagination more room to consider how that same consumer problem could be interpreted differently within your creative vision.
Understand What You Are Actually Benchmarking
Using a competitor as a benchmark does not tell you what you are trying to learn from them. If Hero Cosmetics is a brand benchmark, you could be studying its visual identity, its brand promise, or its messaging.
Each tells you something different about what the brand has created and why it works. Even identifying what you like about a benchmark does not necessarily tell you what you are learning from it.
Looking at color, you can like a competitor’s use of color and recognize that it works without understanding what makes it effective within the larger brand expression. You first have to understand the relationship the color is communicating and how it supports what the brand has created.
Without making that distinction, it becomes easy to copy the expression instead of understanding what made it effective. What you create can become another version of the brand you intended to learn from. Your creative point of view allows you to recognize what within that understanding is relevant to your larger creative vision.
Instead of asking what you can incorporate from a benchmark, you can begin recognizing what it gives you to think about differently in relation to what you are creating.
Creative Benchmarks Develop in Parallel to Your Creative Vision
Brand and product benchmarks can easily become a collection of things you like. Knowing why a benchmark matters makes it much more useful to your imagination.
Instead of benchmarking a brand because you like its visual identity, you might recognize the relationship that visual identity creates. Instead of benchmarking a successful product because you like its formula, you might recognize the role it plays within the brand’s larger product strategy.
Your creative point of view helps you recognize what within those learnings is relevant to your creative vision, giving your imagination something more specific to consider. Your creative benchmarks develop from what you understand to be relevant within those learnings in relation to your creative vision.
As you develop your creative benchmarks, you are developing reference points that help you recognize intuitive fit within what you are imagining.
Successful Interpretations Can Become Category Conventions
When an innovation succeeds, the outcome can become a formula for what others believe they should create next. Eventually, what began as one brand’s creative interpretation can be treated as evidence for what the category is supposed to look like.
As more brands use that success as a benchmark, the interpretation itself can become a category convention. This kind of sameness is not limited to visual identity. It can appear in packaging, product experiences, or marketing communication.
At this point, the benchmark has stopped functioning as a point of comparison. It has become the answer.
Not All Sameness is a Failure of Imagination
Innovation also operates within established constraints.
In the acne-care example, brands often communicate their benefits in similar ways because regulatory requirements limit the claims they can make. The same principle can apply to packaging, product experience, or use instructions, where technical requirements and consumer expectations can establish additional constraints.
Understanding what is a constraint and what is simply an inherited expression of that constraint gives your creative point of view more to work with in considering how to express your creative vision.
Differentiation for its own sake is not the goal.
Creative Benchmarks Give Your Imagination Something to Think Against
Standards help you understand the expectations and constraints within which you are creating. Brand and product benchmarks show you what has already been demonstrated within that reality.
You might recognize how a successful product transformed something functional into something collectible or made an uncomfortable behavior easier to talk about. Understanding why that relationship works helps you understand how that relationship has been made meaningful in reality.
Your creative point of view allows you to recognize what within those benchmarks is relevant to your creative vision. As that understanding informs the development of your creative benchmarks, what already exists becomes material your imagination can think against rather than an answer for what you should create.
Your creative benchmarks give you reference points for considering what else could be possible and recognizing intuitive fit within what you imagine. But recognizing that something makes sense within your imagination is not the same as understanding what you intend to pursue.
Eventually, you have to understand enough about what you are imagining to decide what you actually mean by it.
—by THE BUILD BRIEF