The Art of Writing a Good Concept
Posted by Steve Reeves on March 2, 2012
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In an ideal world we simply would never use concepts, we’d produce prototypes of everything because there’s clearly no substitute for the real thing. However, businesses can’t work that way. Ideas must be made to fight their corner and to jump through hoops to justify every level of investment – which therefore makes great concepts and concept writing unbelievably important.
Here are a few tips on how to avoid writing bad concepts and how to write good concepts!
TIPS TO AVOID WRITING BAD CONCEPTS
1.’THE KITCHEN SINK’ PRINCIPLE
Don’t load every thought you have into one concept so there is no central idea
2.HARD SELL
Don’t try too hard and over-claim your product or service. Consumers will see straight through it
3.BORING
Concepts can often be too functional and flat and the language fails to inspire and engage your audience.
TIPS FOR WRITING GOOD CONCEPTs
1.LESS IS MORE
You don’t have to spell everything out literally! Consumers can infer a benefit.
2. TELL A CONSISTENT STORY
An insight, proposition & RTB that fits together to create a meaningful story
3. BE BOLD
The concept should be able to provoke a reaction and a POV that people can react to.
We believe that there are lots of great ideas in businesses but they’ve never seen the light of day due to badly written concepts. As part of an innovation process we think good practice is to review past concepts to understand why they failed and see if there is any ‘hidden gems’ that got lost in concept translation!
We’ve written an ‘A-Z of concept writing’ to provide guidance on how to make the most of concepts. To find out more, please contact The Value Engineers
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