Picture this: a creative team sits around a table, strategising falls flat, then someone has a brilliant idea seemingly out of nowhere. Suddenly everything clicks. We call it inspiration. We celebrate the eureka moment! High fives all round!
Inspiration is the holy grail in anything creative, and all of us have spent our careers chasing that illusive dragon. But I’d argue we're giving credit to the wrong thing.
What's actually happening when we stumble upon a brilliant idea is something far more valuable—and far more learnable.
If we look at my world—branding—it’s actually something you can turn into process.
Good branding, stripped back to its essence, is one thing: moving people from one emotional state to another. Not (arguably) convincing them to buy something. Not making them remember a logo (although lets be honest, that’s also nice). But creating a shift in how they feel.
The difference between a good rebrand and a great one usually comes down to this: did you identify the emotional gap your audience is experiencing, and did you deliver them to a better emotional place?
We’ve built our practice at How&How on recognizing these gaps. It's not magic. It's pattern recognition. Years of studying human behavior, watching what resonates and what falls flat, understanding the subtle emotional signals beneath surface-level consumer choices. When we look at a brief, we're not waiting for inspiration to strike and hoping for the best. We're reading the emotional landscape and asking: where are people now, and where do they want to be?
That's what happened with Wild Thingz. We didn't need to reinvent vegan confectionary. We needed to understand that parents craved permission to feel a little transgressive, and that kids get high on feeling a little rebellious in an everyday moment. That emotional hunger existed—the category just wasn't addressing it. Once we saw that gap, everything else fell into place. Inspirational!
Saintly by Universal Favourite operates the same way. The shift wasn't about bathroom products; it was about transforming how someone experiences their own self-care ritual. Taking something functional and making it feel luxurious, even sacred. That insight didn't arrive on a whim. It came from years of observing how people construct meaning around small daily moments. Then they elevated it, and gently took the piss out of it too.
And then—just to show that SaaS can do it too—there's Notion: a masterclass in emotional repositioning. They didn't just improve their product interface. They shifted the emotional narrative entirely. From "note-taking app for productivity nerds" to "this is where your entire life can live." From functional to almost spiritual. People didn't just start using Notion differently; they started feeling differently about how they organize themselves.
Here's why this matters: if branding were truly just divine inspiration, it would be unreliable and unteachable. But it's not. It's a discipline. It's about developing the ability to read emotional terrain, to recognize where your audience is stuck and what emotional destination would make them come alive.
The imagination still matters enormously—the craft of bringing that emotional shift to life through language, design and aesthetics. But it's imagination in service of something you've already identified, not imagination hoping to stumble onto the right idea.
That's where the real magic happens. Not inspiration. Expertise.
And that's far more powerful.
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