By Katerina Vati Mitsopoulou
PR Consultant
Allied Business Consultants
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Behind every good public relations campaign is a Big Idea, the creative concept that make the message attention-grabbing and memorable. Creative thinking that produces big ideas is very important in public relations because PR messages have to break through the clutter of a busy media environment and have impact on their target audience’s opinions and attitudes. These creative concepts have to solve communication problems in an original way and be interesting enough that they captivate the minds of the target audience.
Big ideas are designed to address communication challenges. If they are not strategic then they are not big ideas, but rather just random thoughts or tactics. These are two keys to effective public relations ideas: the first is that they must be inherently interesting, and the second is that there must be some logical connection between the great idea and the organization’s communication objectives.
The communicator’s mission is to stage the big idea, to find an exciting new way to present an idea in order to communicate a persuasive message that, in its strategic language, may sound like a dull piece of business writing. To come up with such a big idea, communicators have to move beyond the safety of strategy statements and the traditional way of doing things, and leap into the world of the untried and unknown. Once the big idea has been captured and successfully executed, it often appears simple – the obvious solution to the communication problem. Most public relations efforts attempt to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. The goal is persuasion that results in some kind of impact on opinion. To have impact on attitudes, however, ideas have to have relevance; in other words, they have to mean something to the target audience. So, relevance is an important part of the big idea in public relations.
To be creative, a relevant idea must also have impact. Many mass media communications messages just wash over the audience because they are so common, so obvious or so expected. A message with impact can break through the screen of indifference and focus the audience’s attention on the message. But most of all, in order to have impact the big idea has to be original, fresh or unexpected. Original means one of a kind. Any idea can seem creative if you have never thought of it before, but the essence of a really creative idea is that no one else has thought of it either.
The big idea may come to mind as a visual, a phrase or a thought that uses both visual and verbal expression. The ideal concept is expressed through both the visual and verbal elements. But how do people get big new ideas? Everyone is born with some talent and everyone can develop and improve their personal creative skills if they know what to think about and how to do it.
Getting top level big ideas is hard work. This will be even more important in the 21st century as the communication industry reengineers itself to be more effective, more efficient and more integrated.
