WAKE UP AND FEEL CREATIVE
Every day I wake up and think, “What can I do to help make people’s lives better?” I’ve found that this is an essential part of my daily routine. Starting each day thinking about and contemplating people’s unmet health needs triggers my imagination, and I become impassioned about creating real-world solutions. Then it becomes my life mission, to fulfill on this. It’s what inspires me and keeps me thinking forward.
Feeling creative
As we think about the creative mind’s daily existence, we have to fuel our imagination, and in today’s world, create ideas that actually touch people in authentic ways — ideas that activate a change in behavior and hopefully create a larger conversation. If you think about how to “activate change” and try to define it, isn’t our goal to have our desired audience feel something strongly enough to take an action because of these feelings?
Feeling by design
As I wrote in my article “Empathy by Design,” I encourage every creative to walk in the shoes and experience the daily challenge of the customer that you’re creating for. Once you feel the challenge and also understand how others may feel it, you can create experiences that have emotional resonance and that fill the unmet needs of your customer. Ideas that are empathic will have a greater ability to change behavior because they not only connect people to brands, but also help our customers feel it, whether subliminally or overtly.
Feel health
The thing about health is that no matter the customer, one feels health in some capacity. This alone makes the notion of empathy or “feeling it” a pretty obvious one. When you feel health, both positively and negatively, it activates the imagination while you’re in the process of feeling. Take this a step further and it’s a method of inspiration that I’ve termed, “FEEL CREATIVE.”
Feeling inspires ideas, which inspire designs
When brainstorming and conceiving ideas, we have to ask ourselves,
“What does it feel like to be these customers in the broadest sense of the word and in a microscopic sense? What are their overarching obstacles?” Also, “What does their health journey feel like? How do they experience their day? And when do they interact with content because they have a need?” The questions are endless and can go very deep depending on the customer need that we are trying to understand.
Feeling what’s in their minds
Walking in the shoes of your customers begins to put you in their mindset and in their skin, and allows you to imagine feeling what they go through. This enables you to inspire and create real-world solutions to their problems. In today’s environment, great brands not only understand this unmet need and solve for it, they do it by feeling their customer’s pain points. Great brands recognize that the customer is at the center of everything, and to connect with them, they need to create products and services that solve the customer’s problems. And when marketing these products and services, we must create feeling experiences that are relevant to the customer’s whole life ecosystem, as every generation demands that you feel and understand them as the multifaceted people that they are. We need to remind ourselves that we are all consumers, and we consume information similarly and differently at different times.
FEEL creative for your customer
As you begin to solve your next challenge, start with experiencing a day-in-the-life of your customer. Take the walk; spend the time feeling your customers’ ups and downs. Think about ways that your ideas can help solve their daily problems. Create authentically for them and in ways that understand their health journey. The deeper you go with your thinking and feeling, the greater the opportunity for your brand to create solutions for your customers’ everyday problems. By adopting this “FEEL CREATIVE” mindset, you’ll feel inspired, and you’ll feel like you have the ability to make a difference in someone’s life, which will make going into work every day beyond rewarding.
