AIM FOR THE HEART

Aim for the heart™ is a simple but powerful creative strategy that I developed during my time with Michael Conrad at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. The idea of aiming for the heart works across all agency platforms and disciplines.

What if everything you encounter, had a heart –from the creative brief, the client assignment brief, the media plan and buy, the strategic research, to the creative ideas and executions? They are all inanimate things, but like the Lion they too beg for a heart – to be brave, courageous, fearless and bold.

As creators of content and messages, our only objective should be to create something that evokes and connects to the human spirit’s passion points, which you’ll find in any non-zombies heart.

I challenge any department head to choose a metaphorical weapon and aim for the heart of the consumer. With each department aiming for the same target, he or she, rich or poor, married or single, young or old, won’t have a chance of escaping.

WHAT IF…

• Account teams started asking the client “How can we really aim at the heart of the consumer VS the client leading the discussion and pushing business goals?” Asking the question allows the agency to continue leading the client, making the client feel like the agency is invested in building a partnership and building the consumers brand loyalty.
• Media teams stop buying and planning based on traffic and start asking the question; “Where are my consumer’s passion destinations?” Then pick up their weapons; join forces with the strategic team and aim, fire and buy based on the consumer’s interest. Research companies can’t track passions.
• Strategic research teams, when developing the creative brief, asked themselves a few different questions. “What can I tell my creative teams about this target that will allow them to aim, fire and create?” “Does this strategy aim for the heart of the consumer?” “Where does the heart of the brand and the heart of the consumer meet?”
• Creative teams chose a weapon… mine is an automatic infrared titanium cross-bow… used their weapon, and challenged the Strategic Research team to give them a target worth hitting, and once they have it, used their sights to aim and pick off the insights one-by-one? What if they also ask for the passion points of the brand? You must know the heart of the client to be able to meet their business objective.

Everything you create should have heart and if it doesn’t then it’s dead and who wants to create lifeless work.

Applying Aim For The Heart™:

As it relates to The Agency/Organization:

• Everything the agency does should have heart, brave, fearless, infectious, compassionate, and bold. To ensure and to measure the creative product, create a bar of success that all of the work has to meet based off of a ten point scale. Once the measuring stick is made, do a creative audit (grading the work against the ten point scale) of the work from last year to see where you can do better and meet the new standards you have created. This is also a great way to build the partnership between you and the client – bringing them into the process of the audit, allowing them to grade the work they have approved and see where the agency and client can move forward together.

As it relates to New Business:

• Before engaging in the efforts of new business evaluate each opportunity with a checklist;

1. How healthy is the heart of the agency to take on a new client and what is needed to get the heart of the agency prepared for the win?
2. How healthy is the heart of the new client?
3. What type of heart does the new client have or should it have?
4. How is the consumer connected to the heart of the client and how is the heart of the client connected to the heart of the consumer, and if they are not connected, then how can you make that connection?

By: Marcus Moore / Creative Director

Marcus@AimForTheHeart.me

#ThinkKing