How does consumer insight support the leap to a creative idea: Inside the creative process - Shifting the advertising appeal from functional to emotional

Account planners identify and articulate a key strategic resource, consumer insight, from which creative ideation is said to leap. Insight gives creative staff a license to develop emotional advertising that connects with consumers. Insight works by priming creative staff toward a human truth that holds an inherent tension that an attribute or benefit of the brand can resolve. Some primes are better than others, however. The best ones have strong insight. For this study, an experiment was performed with 60 working creative professionals who developed creative advertising ideas under three treatment conditions: a strong insight, a weak one, and a no-primed-insight control. Although the knowledge domains creative professionals used in executions appeared similar across the three conditions, providing insight led to more emotional appeals rather than functional ones, especially when primed with a strong insight.