Our first Helium essay began with a description of our times as “post-absurd, post-ironic, post-modern, post-postmodern, post-truth (?).” What place does creativity occupy in a culture that asks for more, more, more? How can a brand build for the long-term within this flux?

Tony Wang’s incisive dossier Hyper-Optimization: Creative Stagnation Amidst Cultural Abundance, makes a thorough argument for its headline—we’re seeing more creativity than ever before, but the spirit of this creativity feels dimmer, quashed by a number of inhibiting factors, from algorithms to overgrowth. Culture is flat; subcultures are structurally thwarted; profit motives incentivize repetition of old codes or the imitation of new ones. But brands' creative output remains important and influential because brands have the capital, purpose, and platform to generate creative that can penetrate, and shape, our culture.

At Hugo & Marie we have been asking ourselves: how can brands make creative strategies that access the edges of creativity while still reaching an audience? We believe that simple strategies can generate creative complexity and nuanced strategies can enable future adaptation amidst growth, conflict, or change.

Simple → Complex:

In the new Gary Hustwit film Eno, the artist/musician/polymath Brian Eno describes the double pendulum, a representation of the complex possibilities yielded by combining simple systems. Explained in Clash Magazine: “It’s very easy to see what a pendulum does, very easy to understand and everyone is familiar with it. And then you’d think that putting two of them together – that is to say, hanging a pendulum on top of another pendulum – couldn’t be much different… but it is! It’s completely different, every time.” When tethered to one another, these two simple systems display considerable complexity upon encountering gravity. The two pendulums pull on one another, as gravity exerts its force on each. The larger system’s patterns become less predictable, but they do not stray from their bounding properties. We understand creative strategies in an analogous way.

Effective creative strategies are combinations of simple elements and conceptual guidelines that establish a framework. This framework is often visualized as a creative sandbox for the designers, art directors and copywriters that bring it to life. Guidelines may provide more or less clarified direction depending on the deliverable (a brand concept will need to be expressed more variably over the course of five years than will a campaign, which happens fixedly for a quarter or two). But the right combination of simple elements creates a richer, more complex sandbox.

The right creative sandbox has a combination of toys, tools, and boundaries which propel creative energy rather than restricting expression. Creative strategies establish directed, generative conditions, they do not dictate output. Like the double pendulum, the proper simple systems, arranged well, can give rise to nuanced outcomes when they are executed by different designers, art directors, and copywriters. Our aim as the creative partner for a business is to make sure we’re instituting the right systems based on cultural tides, the creative landscape, and the needs of our clients. However, creative strategies must be able to adapt as cultural circumstances change. How do we make malleable frameworks that can respond to cultural, environmental, and product-driven changes?

Brand Pliability:

In a recent essay for the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman writes about Leslie Valiant’s new book The Importance of Being Educable. Valiant describes one of the book’s central concepts: “We need to build capacious and flexible theories about the world—theories that will serve us in new, unanticipated, and strange circumstances—and we do that by gathering diverse kinds of knowledge, often in a slow, additive, serendipitous way, and knitting them together.”

In a slight adaptation of this characterization, brands must build capacious theories of themselves, (brand identities/systems for expression) that will serve them in “new, unanticipated, and strange circumstances.” These theories must hold room for expression in the long term.

“Human beings constantly improve their own minds through an unfolding, open-ended process that connects newly acquired facts and ideas to ones collected long ago.” Where Valiant describes human educability, we imagine an analogue called brand pliability. Brand pliability is about establishing key principles that provide room for reinterpretation and future growth. Examples of this principle are diverse, from Nike’s embodying every angle of “Just Do It” (from who does it, to how they do it, to why they do it, etc.) to Balenciaga’s relentless appropriation. These are not so simple as formulas: they are theses of expression that need to be reanimated in each creative output. Embracing a key idea that is expansive without being diffuse and prescriptive without being creatively stifling ensures the capaciousness for brand pliability.

At Hugo & Marie, the purpose of creative strategy is to avoid playing and replaying a stagnant script. We seek to build enduring frameworks which enable creative expression and exploration—open enough to lead to unexpected results but cohesive enough to establish a red thread. These strategies are developed with a keen awareness of the essential components of a business, an eye toward the landscape, and an understanding of the audience’s desires, but they do not use demographic data or existing cultural codes as barriers or limits to change and innovation. Strategy needs to build the conditions for future growth without dictating it today—it is the start of each brand’s expressive future.