A framework for making creative decisions

If you’ve produced anything, you know that creative decision making is challenging.  If a project is big, (like for example a website or a record release) then the number of people involved increases and stakes of making good decisions increase.  But the world’s best creative works very rarely come from teams.  They’re the product of a single artist, musician, author or inventor.  In my experience, the bigger the team the harder it is to make the right decisions.

I’ve worked as a band manager, A&R consultant and web entrepreneur and I’ve struggled to make great creative choices every time.  Through managing bands, we created brands for the artists involving the selection of record producers and songs, cover artwork, band photographs, music video ideas and directors, websites, merchandise and live touring themes.  As the manager I’d sometimes work with a huge number of people to create the band’s brand – the record company, publisher, touring agent, our own management team, band girlfriends and family members and of course the artist themselves!  Now I have Posse and we have to make creative decisions every day – big stuff like what should the town and store designs look like, what kind of font should we use and then hundreds of little decisions about the style and content of copy, shape of buttons, how dialogues close, whether we should have straight corners or curved corners!  There are more decisions than you’d imagine and now we have a big team it seems like everyone has a different opinion.

The music industry is an wild training ground because there’s no formal system to anything.  In my nine years in the business, I led the release of twelve major label albums in ten countries and not once did I create a framework for making creative decisions for an artist. Too often, decisions about the next single or the right video were made by committee.  These represented everyone involved: the group with the loudest voice or the biggest cheque often won out.  At a record company, these people were usually 40+ males, completely out of the artist’s target market.  As decision-making processes go, that was as bad as it gets.

Some of the creative my management company produced was truly great, and some was truly terrible.  Looking back, I can see that most of the great stuff tended to be made under quite different circumstances from the bad stuff.  With this hindsight, I can take what I’ve learned in music and create a framework for making functional, creative decisions at Posse.  Here are my views on the process.

1. Define your values

At Posse, I’m lucky to have an amazing set of investors.  Early on, one of them, James Scollay, ran a session with me to define Posse’s brand values.  To start, he asked me to dream about the kind of company I wanted to build.  In five years’ time, what would we be known for?  What would the site feel like to use; what would Posse be like to work at?  He suggested that I come up with up to five core values that, when combined, could govern the brand and company.  My answers back then haven’t changed.  They are: ‘Everyone Wins’, ‘Delightful’, ‘Greatness’, ‘Revolutionary’ and ‘Integrity’.  Even through all of our iterations, the bases for making decisions about our brand, user experience and company culture have remained constant.  Values are often a reflection of the entrepreneur and their dreams, but when there’s a team, they become the team’s values as well.

The whiteboard from my brand session with Evermore. The list on the right are the 6 core values we settled on.

Recently, I’ve been through this process with Evermore in the lead up to their next album release.  I don’t manage the band anymore but were still great friends and earlier this year I was hanging out at their farm near Melbourne.  I shared Posse’s values with them and we pulled out a whiteboard and decided to define what they stood for.  It was so easy.  They knew exactly what their brand should say, and the process of refining it to five or so brand values was incredibly helpful.  I wish we’d done it ten years ago as it would have made making the right decisions so much easier!

2. Trust the instincts of one talented person over a committee.

Great creativity is the vision of one exceptionally talented person, so it’s vital to choose this person carefully and then trust them.  Don’t try to second-guess their decisions or you’ll encourage them to play safe, then they’ll make boring and wrong decisions.  Note that safe creative decisions and disastrous creative decisions tend to be the same thing!   In music, I was lucky enough to find a few brilliant video directors, artwork and website creators whom I trusted on several occasions. They always delivered great work for me because they knew I trusted them.  So they took risks, tried different things and we always got amazing results.

Lisa Mitchell’s fourth video on her last album illustrated the process going wrong.  Vanessa Caswell, who directed the first three clips, had developed a close relationship with Lisa.  She was an awesome director, understood Lisa and her brand, and produced ‘Neopolitan Dreams‘, ‘Coin Laundry‘ and ‘Clean White Love‘ on fairly low budgets.  They’re amazing clips.  Since Lisa was an unknown at this stage, the record companies left us to it.  But when we came to make the clip for ‘Oh Hark‘, she was popular both here in Australia and in the UK.  Now everyone wanted to be involved.  The label wanted a big budget video with a high profile UK director.  Lisa knew Vanessa should have made the clip.  But when the label pushed us, we went with them.  We thought they’d give more support to a song into which they’d had some creative input.  Big mistake!  Teams get behind great creations; they don’t back mediocrity, even if it’s their own.  In this case, we should have listened to both Lisa and the original director.

For another demonstration of what I mean, here are two videos made by artists under my watch: ‘Light Surrounding You’ by Evermore and the ‘Young At Heart’ by Amy Meredith.  Both are similar songs for similar audiences, made with similar budgets.  The Evermore clip was made by awesome director Michael Spiccia, who was left alone to conceive and execute his vision.  The Amy Meredith clip was a painful process: the director’s original pitch was hacked by a team of marketers at the record company who each wanted to remove a part that they weren’t sure about.  The editing process was worse: everyone wanted to put in their two cents and remove a shot here or there.  The resulting video makes very little sense and doesn’t do justice to what should have been a major hit song.  Funnily enough, the label that made the Evermore clip – Warner – all loved the ‘Light Surrounding You’ clip and were proud to take it to media.  The song went on to hit #1 on the ARIA chart while Amy Meredith and Sony parted ways soon after this clip was made.

My point is – don’t think that by involving a committee you’ll get more buy-in, that people will feel more empowered to promote the result.  If the creative result is brilliant, everyone will want to be associated with it no matter whose vision it was.

3. Know and test your target market

In music, we had only the vaguest ideas of our target market.  There was no science behind how we defined the audience for an artist.  One strategy I must have heard a hundred times was, ‘Start this artist on Triple J, we’ll do cool festivals like The Big Day out and Splendour In The Grass, then we’ll crossover to mainstream stations like Nova and Austereo.’  That was it!  Music is somewhat easier than launching a new product, as you can piggyback onto the market of other artists.

But if you’re launching a new product like Posse, you have to think through your approach in much more detail.  Recently, we had to choose how to design our stores and town, and had five artists submit concepts.  They were all good but very different.  My first thought was to share the designs with as many people as I could to get feedback.  I sent them to about fifty friends and our whole team.  Everyone had a strong and different opinion – all five had about the same number of lovers and haters.  It was very confusing!

To help make a decision, we decided to define our target market and test people only in that market.  But would that give us a result that was too niche?  After all, we want Posse to be a global platform with millions of users, so we can’t rule out an entire demographic like ‘men’.  At the same, time I knew that if I tried to please everyone we’d have something bland that no one loved.  So I decided to define and test our target market, which wouldn’t be everyone but would be big.

We focused on four groups who would use Posse: urban females age 16 – 25; urban females age 25 – 38, urban females with kids, and urban males 25 – 45.  We interviewed several people from each of these user groups and learned about the kinds of places they’d recommend to friends, how they used social media, and their creative taste.  We imagined one persona for each of our four audience segments and wrote out a detailed description of their life.  What were their jobs, their weekend activities, the media they consumed and how, their dreams, and their worries.  Then for each, we found a photo of someone who represented that persona.

Now, any creative decision we make we can sense check against these four personas.  For big decisions (like the style of the store and town), we invite a few representatives of each audience segment into the office and tested the different designs on them.  We wanted at least the majority of the representatives to love the design and we knew that none could hate it to the point where they wouldn’t use the product, or we’d rule out a giant part of our potential market.  The result was very interesting and the design we ended up with was a clear winner with our target audience representatives.  It only came third when we polled everyone and didn’t bear in mind the target market – but many of the people who didn’t like it were not in our target market and never would have used the product anyway!

I wish we’d used a framework like this to make decisions in music.  In music, if you are in A&R, you’re supposed to be a music expert with magic ears. You can hear hits and read the wishes of eighteen year-old girls.  I’m sure the industry would have a much better hit rate if music marketers thought through the target market, interviewed them, built personas and then tested single and video choices.

As a music manager, I relied a lot on the artists’ creative instincts and they generally had the final say.  But at Posse, I found myself in the daunting position of having no artist to be the genesis of ideas.  I had the final creative say, although I’d never been in this position and am not an artist myself.  One thing I am good at is spotting great creative talent when I see it, and by following a framework of defining our values, trusting the talent, knowing and testing our target market I feel like I’m in a much better position to make critical creative decisions that will define our product.