Think Like A Finn: Could Finland’s Stoic Cool Be The Key To Great Creativity?

“Finnish happiness isn’t funny-haha happiness,” SEK’s executive creative director Suvi Lähde tells LBB. “It’s closer to a deep contentment and trust in life. And for a creative studio, that turns out to be the perfect conditions.”

Despite the dark winters and the famous sisu (endurance) required to get them through, patriotism and love for the Scandinavian nation – stereotypically renowned for its heavy metal music and its saunas – has inspired not just one but two of the WPP-owned agency’s recent campaigns.

For the‘Finnish Museum Card’, the agency developed a strategy to entice more people to its museums. The plan involved setting up a mini cultural travel service in ‘The Mall of Tipla’, one of Helsinki’s busiest travel agencies in an effort to encourage people who might not usually visit the malls to attend.

​SEK is also the agency behind ‘Chill Like A Finn’, a Visit Finland campaign which invited viewers to submit video entries under the #ChillLikeAFinn hashtag, highlighting what they thought a holiday at Finland’s Lakeland would look like.

Suvi believes that the key to the campaign’s success is the team’s mutual understanding that creativity thrives when conversations can be open and honest. “That trust shapes how we work: people say what they actually think in the room, not in the hallway after,” she says. “Ideas get pressure-tested fast, and that makes them stronger.”

​

‘If you only talk to museum-goers you're preaching to the choir’

​A dose of good-hearted bluntness is critical for driving social awareness, particularly in cultural milieus that are tarnished by a history of gatekeeping, which is often the case for museums.

“If you only talk to museum-goers, you're preaching to the choir,” SEK’s creative director Samuel Räikkönen explains. “We wanted to meet people where their life actually happens, which for a lot of Finns is a shopping centre – that’s where they run their daily errands.”

“Putting a travel agency pop-up there made the proposition tangible,”he says. “You could literally walk in and book a museum trip, no prior interest required. It collapses the distance between "I don't really do museums" and ‘okay, I'll try this.”

Samuel adds that meeting people where they were at physically was critical. “Creating a real space, real brochures, real staff, the whole ritual of planning a trip. It made museum travel tangible in a way a digital campaign never could, you could walk in and book your next destination the same way your parents booked a holiday in the 90s,” he says.

While Finnish culture is known for being well-funded publicly, there is also a strong network of private foundations like the Kone Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Foundation carrying a lot of cultural weight, explains Samuel.

“Together they make culture feel more like a basic infrastructure rather than a luxury. The more interesting effect is what that does to the talent pool. People grow up surrounded by good museums, good design, good architecture, and that becomes their default reference for quality, not something exceptional,” he says.

Beyond the ‘basic metrics’: what agency folk can learn from Finnish creativity

While one idea is hyper-local and rooted in Finnish daily life and cultural context, much of the agency's work is focused on more global brands and the same principles apply.

Samuel emphasises that social and cultural awareness, as well as being flexible and appealing to international markets is critical to the agency’s success.

“Most of the brands we work with are challengers on a global market,” he explains. “They can't compete on media spend, so they can't afford to hide behind industry clichés either. Creativity has to do the real work.”

For instance, the basic insight behind ‘Chill Like A Finn’ is that as the world’s happiest nation, Finns holiday a certain way, and this should be shared with the world.

“The verbal form draws on a Visit Finland distinctive asset,” Suvi says. “We've consistently used the ‘Like A Finn’ construction and the word "Finn" across our communication to keep destination Finland unambiguous in international markets. That's deliberate brand-building: a challenger creates value cumulatively on the elements that work, rather than starting from scratch every time.”

And due to the fact that Finland has just 5-5.4 million speakers who speak the Uralic language, SEK’s creative work has to deliver in ways that land in Swedish or English too.

“You learn early that the same idea has to survive in multiple languages,” says Samuel. “The punchline in Finnish rarely lands the same way in Swedish or English. So you stop relying on wordplay alone and look for ideas that work structurally, visually, behaviourally. It's good discipline. It also makes you humble about how much of great copy is actually translation-proof. Again, something we learn when working as a challenger globally.”

But for Suvi, the biggest lesson global commercial creativity can take from Finnish agencies is the ability to think outside the box and push for change.

“If nothing happens beyond the basic metrics, you’ve lost an opportunity to have an impact with creativity,” concludes Suvi. “That only works if people feel safe enough to say what they actually think, not what others expect. A lot of agency time gets burned on choreography, softening feedback, performing enthusiasm. Finns skip most of that.”