Thought Leadership
What to do When Your Creative Team Just Doesn’t Get It
You’re not receiving great work from your teams or agencies. You feel like they’re not getting your ask or your brand. The RFP process is expensive and time-consuming, and you didn’t get anything you loved. Your creative team is giving you ideas that are missing something or just missing the mark. This is where I suggest it might be a you problem. But fear not. Read on to discover and steal the best way to set expectations and set your creative team on a path to breakthrough ideas with a simple, clever brief.
Ideas Have an Aftertaste
Aftertaste often has negative connotations but the word itself purely means the persistence of a sensation (as of flavor or an emotion) after the stimulating agent or experience has gone. And I suspect we’ve all had the experience of a persistent sensation after hearing an idea. I think that’s an important clue. If you’re even remotely in the business of ideas, I want you to be the most perceptive person in the room because it’s through that tuning in that you will notice when you’re onto something.
A Strong Business in Search of Its Soul
What’s become clear over the last few years is that it’s remarkably easy to lose your business. Your brand is more porous than ever. There are as many marketing experts as there are pop psychologists on TikTok, telling you to pour money into articulating your “why.” As I reflect on the companies that have lost their way and lost their business, the more I see that as seductive a proposition as it was, the soul of that company — that stable, strong, consistent, slightly dull company — was not actually something they needed to go in search of. Read more about what’s going on and how to focus.
How the Humble Timeline Unlocks Deep Understanding
In strategy, like in story, we often have to play professional empath. Perhaps the single most important thing to do is take clients and creative partners on a journey into someone else’s life — someone you need them to empathize with so that when you convince them of what they’re up against, why you’re fighting for them, and how you’ll do that, your clients and partners are all in. I offer the timeline as a tool so simple it feels like a cheat code.
Your Product Is Your Brand. And It’s a New (Old) Era of Marketing.
“What sells the car — the brand or the car?” Was the question I asked Bob Lutz, GM. As too much content and too many narratives are being churned out by humans and machines, creating a glut of human-centered, cultural chatter, brand storytelling blindness is starting to change the industry. We’ve just re-arrived at a new era of product storytelling — a place where your product is your brand. And that’s the kind of brand strategy that will break through.
Insights are Intangible Assets and Should be Protected
Insights are the bedrock of brands. They help companies differentiate and are the reason why consumers will pay more for one product over a generic that performs just as well; driving up the brand value. Insights are sometimes so well-said, they don’t need any copywriting, craft, or clever conceit to imprint them on audiences through marketing and advertising at all. But insights can languish in creative briefs. If intangible value represents 80% of the value of the S&P 500, I think it’s time to take them seriously and invest in them appropriately.
Scenario Planning and the Premortem
Budget constraint, compressed timelines, failing fast and moving forward… this assemblage of a business rubric has become the norm, creating an environment in which taking time to do proper postmortems is becoming extinct. But where we can create space for rigorous decision-making, we must. After all, strategy is just another way of saying “deciding”, and as long as we agree strategic planning is better than reactionary guessing, then creating tools to do it good and fast is our mandate. Discover why I think premortems are the way to go for your best future proofing device.
Why Pair Programming May Still Be The Best Model for Planning
In advertising and communications, we increasingly use digital data for primary research. We tend to call the departments that “own” data or this responsibility Insights and Analytics. The thing is, great data analysts and great insights people are more often than not, two people, yet we keep trying to staff teams with single people who can miraculously embody both skillsets. Between software and creative, we do have a working model to examine and one that I believe creates better outcomes.