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Nowadays, this is our biggest creative challenge. Throughout the years and with the present economical crisis, the idea of creative professional as a ‘lunatic’ vanished, bringing more rationality to the working process. These changes resulted in a new and improved relation with the clients.
According to Alexandre Duarte, “Oficina de Portfolio” coordinator, “it’s not hard to think outside the box”, but to “know that the box has walls”. It’s not difficult to have a good idea, but to have one that is executable. Consequently, “it’s within these walls where the biggest challenge lies”.
Inside these walls the battle of perception begins, which is an essential point in marketing activity. “Marketing is not a battle of products but of perceptions”, says Alexandre Duarte. Therefore, a brand value is itself in the values and not in the product. “It is even possible to sell a brand that doesn’t have any product associated”, he affirms, “like Neau Water, which is only a plastic bottle with regular water inside”. “The rational side assumes a huge weight”, defends Mário Mandacarú, Portuguese Creatives Club president, that along with Maria de Lourdes Matta, also a Club member, completed the range of guests who led the debate around the importance of rationality in the creative process. Though we can’t dissociate the passional side from the rational one, Mandacarú believes that “there is not one designer that doesn’t want always to do better than last time” and in that way, it’s the passional side that motivates him. They are two sides of the same coin. “Rational can’t live without passional”, he concludes.
PTo illustrate this view, Alexandre Duarte explains that the time when “the eccentricity of the designer was cultivated, when being a designer was a status, is now over”. Design is nowadays evolving into “just another way of communication, just one more tool among others”. Duarte stated the importance of integrated communication planning which includes not just one but many ways to communicate. This leads him to believe that “advertising as we knew is not dead, but is surviving through a life support machine”.
This new communicative and creative process includes more than ever the client, who with the actual crisis revealed itself as “less tolerant”, Mário Mandacarú indicates. A change that he considers “important” because “the best works were done when the client was closer to the project and was more exigent”. This way, the attitude from fifteen years ago where the client was sometimes pushed to second plan, “makes no sense anymore”. A change “caused by the new position of the client which forced the designer to change too”, says Alexandre Duarte.
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