What Cookbooks Taught Me about Creative Strategy (And the Frameworks I Use as a Result)
Most strategists I know didn’t start at an agency or with formal strategic training, which I would argue is a strength. Today, I’m the senior creative strategist at Teak, a San Francisco-based boutique agency, but my path began far from the world of advertising. As a kid, I spent most days paging through magazines, memorising every story so I could present the latest trends and tips (like how to avoid clammy palms the first time you held a boy’s hand) to my small-town, pre-teen gaggle. Magazines gave me insights into worlds I didn’t have access to, and I was enthralled. It was no surprise to anyone that I pursued publishing and spent the first 12 years of my career publishing interior design magazines, academic literature, and celebrity cookbooks.
I believe storytelling is the most impactful way to change someone’s mind, and publishing, as I saw it then, was a tool for spreading ideas to a wider audience. As my career matured, I wanted to expand beyond authors to help more individuals and brands tell their stories, so I took a job as a creative strategist. While I felt more energised than ever, a career pivot in my 30s wasn’t ideal. Add a pandemic to the mix and I felt up a creek with no mentors or resources to guide me. I didn’t know how to approach creative strategy or even what the final deliverables should be. All I could do in those early days was repurpose what I learned from publishing: to ask, “What story is worth telling here?”
It’s been four years since I pivoted, and I still lean on my publishing foundation. Here’s what publishing taught me about being an effective creative strategist:
1. A Best-Selling Book Begins with a Clear Problem to Solve
I partnered with a cutting-edge non-fiction publisher who, at the time, was using keyword data to spot niche opportunities in the market. If a term like 'vegan cookbooks' had a lot of searches and few search results, it might be worth pursuing. Those insights might have pointed out opportunities, but they didn’t tell us what problems people were trying to solve by eating vegan. We had to read reviews, observe other resources this audience used, and ask them questions about cooking, diet, and lifestyle to understand why they would consider buying a vegan cookbook. By deep-diving into readers’ motivations, we always learned something unexpected that helped us produce more targeted content.
In campaign planning, I’ve found that clients often struggle to articulate the real problem they’re solving for their audience. Many briefs identify the brand problem as something high-level, like low revenue or decreased subscription rates. They don’t identify the audience’s problem. Their problem statements don’t provide enough information to tell an impactful story. It turns out there's a strategic framework called The 5 Why’s Technique that is similar to what I used in publishing: by asking, “Why is that?” five times in a row, you get to the heart of why your audience isn’t growing or why more people aren’t subscribing.
2. If you can write a book outline, you can plan a campaign
Outlining a book is more than just breaking down an idea into chapters; it involves deep research into the content, the audience, and the competition. For both books and ad campaigns, you have to think about a few things: is this concept cohesive with my brand or imprint? What has my audience or reader been critical of in the competition? What are the current sentiments and growing trends within this genre or category? Etc.
Publishing taught me that the foundation needed for building something truly impactful involves a deep understanding of the audience, the subject matter, and the environment. Planning codified it for me. In planning, there’s a framework called the four Cs in which you research the company, the culture, the category, and the consumer to better understand how to build a campaign that will resonate with your audience.
3. Persuasive stories tap into an emotional experience, no matter how dry the subject matter
Solving your audience’s problem will get you in front of your audience, but it doesn’t guarantee that they’ll make a purchase. At the end of the day, buying is an emotional experience. Every touchpoint in our publishing strategy, from outlining to marketing, was informed by some ambition or sentiment. It wasn’t just about solving a problem; it was about showing our readers we understood them.
How do you do that for a product or brand? Through deep listening. Your audience will tell you what they want and, more importantly, who they want to be – if you ask the right questions. An important role of a creative strategist or planner is to read between the lines and guide a conversation that leads to an insight. (This was one of my favourite campaigns that accomplished just that.) Yet another strategic framework I wish I had known about in my publishing career is an empathy map, a technique where you bucket out what your audience hears, sees, thinks, feels, says, fears, does, and wants. This holistic view can guide you to insights that resonate on an emotional level.
4. Your brand plays a big factor in how successful your launch is
I think the reason I was able to transition into this career is because I see storytelling and brand as synonymous. What is a brand if not a story you tell over and over again to an audience of people that buy into it? A crucial step in finding a story worth publishing was in the author selection. I spent a lot of time seeking authors with a clear and established point of view (for whom the book was merely an extension of their brand). That’s not to say you have to be a celebrity to have a successful book (or even a previously published author), but having a brand that is established within a community does play an important role. That’s because people buy into why you do something, and finding an author with a compelling motivation supported our strategy of selling books that related on an emotional level.
Understanding your 'why' is also a strategic framework that I’ve used with many clients to help them reinvigorate their brand voice or story. In the words of Simon Sinek, “People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.” He famously created the Golden Circle exercise which I often use to help companies get clear on their brand positioning.
So, what did a career in publishing teach me about being an effective creative strategist? A lot. For one, if you’re interested in creative strategy or planning, there are established frameworks that can guide you. But perhaps the most important lesson for me was not to wallow in imposter syndrome. Great strategists can come from diverse backgrounds, but they are all observant, deeply curious people who like a good story.
