We caught up with Teemu Suviala Global Chief Creative Officer at Landor before CHARGE North America on May 29th.
- Teemu, as Global CCO at Landor, how do you personally define ‘creative energy’ — and why is it so essential for brands today?
Creative energy, for me, is the force that transforms insight into impact and a brand from being merely recognizable to deeply felt. It’s the spark that ignites when we connect a deep understanding of human needs with innovative ideas, resulting in work that truly resonates on a visceral level. It’s about challenging assumptions, embracing curiosity, and fostering an environment of bold experimentation.
Creative energy is essential for brands to thrive when the world continues to cycle through changes at a faster pace – in a more fragmented mediascape. Brands need to cut through the noise with clarity and differentiation. Without creative energy, brands risk becoming bland, forgettable, and ultimately, irrelevant.
2. In a world of information overload and shrinking attention spans, what do you believe makes a brand’s creative expression truly memorable?
Memorable creative expression comes from a combination of relevance, difference, and deep, emotional resonance. The message needs to be simple, focused, and easy to understand. The brand needs to stand out from the competition and offer something unique. It’s about building something your competitors can’t touch.
3. Energy branding can sometimes lean towards the functional and technical — how do you inject emotion, storytelling, and cultural relevance into brands in this space?
Even in the energy sector, emotion, storytelling, and cultural relevance are essential. It’s about moving beyond the functional and finding the human story within the technology or service and showcasing the impact of those to people’s lives in a meaningful, emotive, and often multi-sensorial way. You have to connect the brand to a larger purpose that resonates with people’s values and how it makes a difference. We need to tap into cultural trends, or better, play a part in creating them, and create a multitude of emotions through multisensory experiences and conversations to connect with audiences.
4. For energy brands trying to shift perception or tell a sustainability story on a lean budget, what creative approaches tend to resonate most with audiences?
Constraints are always a powerful catalyst for creativity. On a lean budget, the most effective approaches are often those that are most authentic, community-driven, and focused on creating shared value with as much clarity as possible. It’s important to map the peak experiences on a customer’s journey and create for those peaks to maximize the impact.
5. Do you think constraints like smaller budgets can actually fuel more original, inventive ideas? Have you seen any great examples of this in your work?
Absolutely. Constraints force us to think outside the box, focus on those peak brand moments and find creative solutions that we might not have considered otherwise.
6. And a teaser for CHARGE: what can we expect from your session this month? Any case studies, predictions, or creative solutions you’re bringing to the stage?
We will share insights and examples of brand cases where we’ve used the combination of insights and analytics together with creativity and design to create work that is truly different, brave and highly impactful. Data is a place of inspiration and we should celebrate that more.