The quicksand of our assumptions

Why is it, we often arrive at trivial results?

OK. It's the majestic "We" used here. I should assume you don't generate "trivial" solutions very often.
But courtesy aside and back to the initial question:

One reason for trivial results is certainly the lack of time and resource to confront oneself with the reality "out there" and get  NEW insights. (I always wondered why noone admits this in the face of those one-week-from-now briefs with a budget of 0,-".)

In my world, all too often, solutions are built on our own assumptions about how things are, what the problem is, what could help, etc. They simply have to. So we get to our solutions by thinking. In a way our brains simply produce it ... yes within themselves, somehow.

And you know what - actually, this can be a quite valuable capacity of our brains. Senior strategists & consultants are valued exactly for this ability: to have hypotheses built on what they heard and know plus their basic assumptions about how things 'usually' work. The ability to start somewhere to get somewhere. At McKinsey they call this "hypothesis lead thinking". Which basically means: turn the intuitively "right" process around and don't go out researching in order to get your 'findings', but have the hypotheses first. Scientists work the same way, too. They don't just "go out and research". They try to test hypotheses that they came up before - based on their and other scientists' assumptions and beliefs.

Having said that, we still have to realize that - in contrast to what McKinsey or scientists do - we have creativity, newness and distinctiveness as at least major criteria for our output. This is the very reason why "triviality" seems to be something to be avoided. Scientists and McKinsey worry most about how true their thinking is. We also should be worried about that, but in addition to that we strive for a thinking that is different.

So how can we avoid thinking the same (maybe wrong) things we and others usually think  - even without conducting exploratory research? I want to offer you a technique that came to my mind recently. It's not really tested yet but it's tempting to write it down.

The technique is called The Assumptions Quicksand or less frightening: Assumptions Questioned.
The idea: to use the fact that our thinking might be based on wrong and often commonly shared assumptions to our advantage. It works like this:

1) CONSTRUCT: Write down what you think about the task and possible solution. (Possible structure: What's the problem here? What should be our main objective? Why? How could we get there?)

2a) DECONSTRUCT I: Assume that every minute piece of meaning in this short text is wrong and write down as many possible alternatives to as possible.

2b) DECONSTRUCT II: Do it again. But go deeper : write down the very basic assumptions your initial statements were built on. (Ask yourself: What are the "truths" that make this statement plausible? Then deconstruct them.) Again: for each of the basic assumptions state as many possible alternative assumptions & derived hypotheses as possible.

3) RECONSTRUCT: Condense the alternatives to build 4-5 truly different, plausible but intriguing strategic stories.

4) Go talk to someone who can pull you out of the quicksand again.

An example how this might work:

1) Initial strategic story: "The client wants to rejuvenate the brand with the new ad campaign in order to appeal to younger target groups. We should try to keep the existing brand essence but express it in a more youthful, modern way. Let's ask ourselves what is un-modern and un-youthful in their today's communications and reverse that."

2a) Now, it doesn't matter if the above is right or smart etc. Or if our alternative statements will be. We just begin deconstructing each of the bits and pieces. Here just some possible, very obvious deconstructions and alternative constructs:

- "Yes, it's about appealing to younger target groups, but it's maybe not about an ad campaign, it's about making them try the product they have forgotten. How might we do that?"
- "Or maybe it is not about younger people but about recruiting new users among brand rejectors. Younger people being just on sub-group. Why do people reject the brand?"
- "It's not about rejecting the brand, it's about rejecting the whole product category. Why do people reject the category?..."
- "We shouldn't just keep the the brand essence but develop it further. E.g. we could find it's emotional benefit that also appeals to younger people / or brand rejectors."
- "Yes, we could go for rejuvenation based on existing brand essence but we shouldn't analyze what's un-modern, un-youthful in their communication. Instead we should analyze how other now youthful brands mastered rejuvenation."
- etc. etc. etc.

2b) And now, we question the yet unquestioned, the most plausible:
- "Maybe it's not the client who wants all this but it's his boss, instead. The client himself actually would like to keep it all as it is. Can we satisfy both?"
- "What if it's not about the brand at all. It's about the overall portfolio they have with this brand playing a certain role in it. What role might that be?"
- "There's the underlying assumption that advertising should be about expressing some sort of brand essence. But maybe we shouldn't express anything, but just reprogram some of the brand rejectors' behaviors?"
- "I seem to believe that 'old' is 'bad', but is it? Why is it? Is it? ..."

3) Now we try to build alternative (now even more hypothetical, but less trivial) strategic stories. E.g.:
- "The client wants to get new customers. I believe the brand should recruit new target groups who reject the whole product category. Rejectors happen to be younger, but it's not age but their disposable income that restricts them. We should reframe category usage as being absolutely worth the money. How could we do that?"

4) Having some of those strategic stories - go and talk to someone.

5) Oh, sorry, there is no 5. We are not with McKinsey, are we?

So what do you think? It seems like a too open mind game. It's also not quite there yet in terms of rules and formats. But it might have the power to make you cling less to your preconceptions thus open up space for a less trivial thinking. At least I hope so.


Who is it you want to gain as a new type of customer?

Brand Relevance - David Aaker's Insights into True Competitiveness

Quite recommendable! Have fun watching.

Love this chart here:

Please note: it's not just about psycho-fluff-relevance, it's about creating and owning a sub-category.

Relevant vs Interesting

"Freak Bike Accident"
Look at the picture.
Sorry, wasn't necessary to tell you so. You looked anyway.

You probably found it "interesting" enough to not filter it out immediately. You probably had a second look. But at the same time - it's completely irrelevant to you. It could be any other striking image. It doesn't matter, really. It doesn't matter much to me either. But "it does the job". The job of drawing attention to it. To make you read on.

So what is "interesting"? (Why) is it important? Why do planners and advertisers talk about "interestingness" so much? (Assuming planners' talk being a sign of any significance.)

Let's start with "Relevance" first. 
Relevance is probably the number one God of 20th century advertising & brand building. (Number one of the Holy Trinity: Relevance, Differentiation, Credibility.)
What marketers mostly mean by "Relevance" is something like this:
If a notion can influence a person and his purchase decision or product evaluation, then it is "relevant". Say, it's "relevant for product/brand choice". Usually it is very unsubtly asked for in surveys through questions like "When it comes to shaving cream I appreciate ... ". Hate those ones. As if anyone could give a proper answer. Anyway,...

In the course of the late 20th century "relevance for product evaluations and purchase decisions" has been partly complemented by the notion of "relevance in people's lives". This was an attempt to escape parity on product level by connecting products with something important to people using them. Thus, relevance that used to simply "come with" certain product features/qualities, now has become a matter of interpretation and could be modified by advertising without major changes in product qualities. You just told people that Nescafé makes people more social and talkative - thus Nescafé became seemingly more relevant in life just by advertising magic. No new coffee formula, no cocaine supplement inside. Advertising started to tell people why and how things are relevant in their lives. (Later, brands went to far and started talking about life itself and behaved as if they were psychotherapists. Advertising agencies thought the more they talked about "life" the better it would be for the brand advertised. "Life" was probably the most used word in advertising - often accompanied by crude Orwellish imperatives. "Be yourself", "Think different", etc.)

So, two major brand planning techniques were involved in the issue of relevance:
1) identify relevant qualities of a brand/product that would fuel preference for it,
2) create relevance by connecting qualities of a brand/product with people's needs, wants or beliefs - again, in order to fuel preference for it.

click to source
Don't get me wrong - with all that ironic undertone. Relevance still is an important notion. Actually most planners work with it in mind. And, even in distinguished circles of tech savvy people, relevance is still "hot" - when you look into areas like e.g. app development and user experience. You simply need to know what really counts for people and how your brand can help people achieve what's important to them.

Now, let's get to "Interestingness".
You could not sensibly say that coffee's function as a social lubricant ("makes you enjoy conversations") is "interesting"! It is relevant - or "creates" relevance -  in the marketing sense of the word - since it connects the brand and what it does with something valuable in life. But it is not very interesting. Why?

When we look up "interesting" in a dictionary we find two clusters of meaning. One meaning very much resembles "relevance" in the sense of  being personally important or useful. The other one revolves around a state of being mentally consumed by something. It must be this second meaning of interesting - attention being absorbed by something - that "coffee as a social lubricant" is missing.

On the other hand, relevance - it seems - can be a source of interestingness: attention being involuntarily drawn to something that is important. So there is an intersection of relevance and interestingness: things can be both. But lots of interesting things aren't relevant and vice versa.

Let's leave definitions aside and look into emotions. What is your feeling when something is interesting? "Wow, that's interesting!" And what is your feeling when something is relevant? Exactly: "interesting" comes with a surprise. And it translates into curiosity. You want to spend time with it to find out and understand more. Relevance doesn't do that, necessarily. So is relevance "weaker" than interestingness?

Interesting stuff is quite random - anything could be interesting. The less expected - the more interesting. Interesting pieces of content don't need a certain context. "Interestingness" can start at total ignorance. Did you know that Hitler's wife actually survived her suicide attempt in May 1945 and was shot by a compassionate Russian soldier? You didn't. Good. It's not true, either. But it arouses interest, doesn't it? Just like the accident image above. It's an interesting piece of fiction. A "story" - as today's self-proclaimed "storytellers" would call it. The thing is - this kind of interest and interestingness just leads nowhere. And that's the problem.

Interestingness in today's planning debate.
The driving force behind advertisers' interest in interestingness is their declining ability to gain attention for brands in today's media landscape. Content gets produced and shared by people and organisations in amounts and at a speed unimaginable in the 80ies, or 90ies, or 2 years ago, actually. Being interesting is an imperative in a world of scarce attention. So far so good. And true.

The controversy and the slightly biased debate in the planning community (and it's definitely the blogging and the digital planning part of the community and almost noone else) began when planners tried to make Interestingness a New God. Probably not Nr. 1, but Nr. 2, just behind the obscure term "Engagement". Making something a God works like this: Make people believe that it's not an intermediate goal but the final one. And that's exactly what some planners imply: forget being relevant in terms of influencing purchase decisions between brands and start being interesting in order to compete with other content producers. That's the goal. The Goal.

Well, I seriously believe that this is incorrect. There is no evidence that a brand actually can BE "interesting". Neither has anybody shown evidence of a connection between being interesting and selling more products - regardless of positioning, message, product qualities etc. Well, of course noone can show such evidence since there is no measurement of brands "being interesting". People probably wouldn't understand a question like "Do you find this brand interesting?". Brands are not made to be interesting. Content can be interesting. Brands cannot. Unless they are new in the market or represent novel business ideas (which would make them "content" themselves).

Let's take facebook as a brand. It's one of those seldom brands that are "new" and "fascinating" to society. That is why facebook is a topic, i.e. content in other media. Everybody writes about Zuckerberg. He's interesting. But does all this translate into sales or new members? Is it facebook's "interestingness" that drives their success or is it their relevance in terms of the tools they offer? There's certainly some effect of this kind of publicity, but it is marginal, isn't it.

The relation between interesting content and brands has often been described as "Brands as Curators" or even more ambitiously "Brands as Content Producers". While I completely understand that a brand can spend money on curating or producing whatever they want to, I don't quite understand how this spend is finally justified in terms of selling products. A question that is quite looked down upon by many planners today. One that seems to be not very "interesting" to the planning community.
I personally doubt that pure attention sells enough (though it certainly does sell - if  the brand gets remembered correctly or direct sale is being initialized). I also doubt that the stuff that brands actually do produce or curate really does arouse as much attention as would be needed to sell more products.

It seems to me sometimes that planners buy into theories and paradigms not based on those theories ability to sell more products for clients but based on their ability to make the planners think of themselves as "not being in advertising but in something else". It just feels nicer to say "I help brands become interesting and curate cultural content" instead of "I help Boeing sell more Fighter Jets". Maybe "interesting" is a term that we like to be used to describe ourselves?

Anyway, to clear up the mess above, here's my first more or less structured piece of text on this topic:

1) Being interesting is an intermediate goal. It's not the final one. It has been one before the digital age as well.
2) Interesting stuff that actually has relevance in purchase decisions is key. The other interesting stuff is optional.
3) And yes, relevant stuff that is not at all interesting will have problems to gain attention & credit.
But it's still possible to buy attention. It just got a bit more expensive and quite a bit more frustrating. Not impossible.
4) Great products that have inherent intrinsic relevance are interesting enough - and don't need planners to make them interesting ... or relevant.


Which problem could my brand solve if it tried hard enough?

How to innovate & strategize using the beliefs managers have about their business

This one is a direct quotation of an article I read today. So all of the below is not from me but from this site here: 
"How do you go about challenging the “sacred cow” beliefs that your company — or you yourself — hold?
In “Uncommon Sense: How to Turn Distinctive Beliefs Into Action,” a new article in the Spring 2012 issue of MIT Sloan Management Reviewauthors Jules Goddard, Julian Birkinshaw and Tony Eccles from the London School of Business argue that winning strategies are grounded in distinctive beliefs that ring truer with customers and prospective customers than those of rival companies.
Being consistently and distinctively different means understanding your beliefs — or what the authors call your “uncommon sense.”
“In our experience working with companies, there are structured ways for rethinking your basic assumptions and beliefs, and for identifying potential new directions,” they write.
Here are seven steps the authors have used to start the process. The text is verbatim from their article.
  • “Assemble a group of employees who are deeply familiar with how you do business — some who have been around a very long time, and some who are new to the company. Particularly useful are those who have worked for close competitors, as well as those who are known to be a little contrarian.
  • Ask them individually to articulate their basic assumptions — about your business model (who the customer is, what the customer values, how you make money), about your management model (how people are motivated, how decisions are made and resources allocated, how objectives are set), and about the future of the industry.
  • Their beliefs or assumptions can typically be separated into two groups: the beliefs or assumptions that almost everyone agrees about — the common beliefs; and those that only a few people identify — the uncommon beliefs (some of which are likely to look a bit odd, some plain wrong and others potentially profound).
  • For the commonly held beliefs, consider how you would know if they were true. Don’t just presume that because everyone says “we are in a commodity industry” that this is necessarily a hard fact. What experiment could you do to verify or falsify this statement? The purpose of this exercise is to identify the “common nonsense” — the beliefs everyone holds that are actually not hard laws of nature.
  • For the uncommon beliefs, consider why some people believe them to be true. What information or experience are they d/rawing on? What experiment could you do to verify or disprove it?
  • Finally, it is worth reassembling the original group of people to brainstorm about possible beliefs that you might want to consider about your business model, your management model or your industry’s future. Can you identify beliefs that are quite possibly wrong, but worth experimenting with anyway?
  • The net result of this process is typically a list of possible experiments to conduct. Some can be done in the regular course of business; others may need a special team and a budget. In our experience, it is worthwhile to agree on a process for conducting and reviewing the experiments over a period of time (usually three to six months). This is your pipeline of potential advantage.”
For more about how to turn distinctive beliefs into action, read the full article from which this list is excerpted. The authors are all affiliated with the London Business School: Jules Goddard is a fellow of the school’s Centre of Management Development; Julian Birkinshaw is a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship; and Tony Eccles is also a fellow of the Centre of Management Development."

Channel Planning Choices

Brand Value as Brand's Contribution to People's Lives


Which question are we answering right now and is it the right one?

Change Behavior, not Attitudes!

This is not necessarily my strict opinion, I just really like what (& how) Ad Contrarian writes.


What if the 'safest' assumptions our views are based on were wrong?


If brands were answers to questions, which question would that be for your brand?

Neuroscience and channel planning

Does this sound like an intriguing title? I must disappoint you. It's not even about channel planning, really.

All I have to offer is a cynical analogy:

"Channels" type of thinking is to great ideas what neuroscience is to psychology. A futile attempt to reduce landscapes to maps and mind to matter.

49 archetypes of fascinating personalities - according to 'Fascinate'

Framing the problem

(from Jon Steel's "Perfect Pitch")

Corporate Strategy Styles from BCG

The 3 Dimensions:
Unpredictability: Can we predict the state of "our world" in the future?
Malleability: Can we ourselves influence how our world will be in the future?
Harshness: How hard will change hit us?

Planning as problem solving? Brands as tension resolvers?

In an earlier post I wondered if problem-centered thinking really is the best description of how planning works or even should work. You can find that article here & here's Mark Pollard's article that triggered my doubts back then. Let me quote some of the doubts I've had: Do we need a Big Problem to arrive at a Big Idea? Can a lasting brand positioning always be built based on an actual problem the brand has right now? Or take another example: do we need a problem to outline a christmas promotion? Or when a brand is not there yet, its problem is so to say that it doesn't exist, yet. Is this really helpful to find the Big Insight into a Human Truth?
My answer to all that tended to be "no".

In recent times my thinking about those questions evolved further. Two things changed in my mind: 
1) I stopped understanding "problem" as just our client's problem but involved consumers' problems as well.
2) I stopped calling it "problem" and tend to call it "tension" - though I'm still looking for a better term.

At the moment I seem to believe that we really could frame any useful information used for strategy as a tension - a.k.a. problem. Firstly, there are client problems communication is supposed to solve. You could also call them "objectives" and that is the way they are codified most of the time. (Let's postpone the discussion if a "negative" framing is better than the "positive".) Secondly, there are consumer motivation phenomena which in Mark Pollards infographic are rather called "Insight". Well, my main point is that those again can all be framed as tensions - a.k.a. problems, although the word problems works less neatly. 

Some insights and ideas are tension-driven in a very obvious way:
- "Real Beauty" is built on the tension between what women look like and what society/advertising wants them to look like. 
- "Dirt is good" is built on the tension between parents' laissez-faire vs tidiness motivations. Or put it less intellectually, every detergent brand is somehow built on the dirt induced tension: "I want it to go away somehow". 
- Avis's classic positioning was built on the tension between being second in the market and people thinking that the Nr.1 is always better than Nr. 2. 
Problem! Dilemma! We need a Solution with a capital S!

But for months and even years I have been struggling with other great insights/ideas/positionings that seemed to be of no problem-centric nature at all. Examples of those stubbornly "positive" insights/ideas are: 
- "Johnnie Walker. Keep walking."
- "Felix cat food. For cats with character"
- "Ebay. 3-2-1-mine" (the latter being built around the thrill of auction shopping). 
There are many more examples out there. Actually more of this "positive" type than of the obviously tension-centric type. So how can we deal with this? Could these positive framings be re-framed in a tension-centric way?  Would this help in any way if they could?

What I found out is: these "positive" insights/ideas are not built upon lines of tectonic tensions but they always derive their value from tensions. Simply because there is no value without deficit and no meaning without opposition

Let's take "Johnnie Walker. Keep Walking." Very obviously, the idea came from the brand name. Probably most of the psychology around it has been made up in retrospective. But that doesn't matter on the level of Truth. (It really doesn't matter if Truth has been discovered in a "proper" linear-chronological, methodical way or accidentally or even in retrospective. Actually, it always happens accidentally, but that's another story.)   Back to "Keep Walking". It's an expression of an attractive psychological proposition: probably it's something like Personal Development or Life Success, maybe even Societal Development or Human Progress. Well if every person would develop herself to the max there wouldn't be any value in personal development. If all societies got better anyway there again wouldn't be any value in referring to it. So the value of "Keep Walking" lies in the scarcity of progress - thus in Human Inertia! 
Ha! I like it. So maybe we don't exactly need a Big Problem to arrive at a Big Idea but the presence of a Big Problem reassures us that our Idea actually is Big.

Ok, where does the value in "Cats with Character" come from? You see, this is the trickiest one! And again - it doesn't matter how those ad guys actually arrived at that idea - probably by having an Old-Fashioned at the bar. The question is rather - where does the power of the idea reside? My feeling is - and this might sound weird - that the true power of the "Cats with Character" idea lies in the opposition to dogs. Character is what dogs lack if you ask cat lovers. The value of having a cat and not a dog lies in the cat's independence and weirdness. 
On the other hand you actually do not need the opposition to dogs to get to that notion. You could really get there in a very straight way: "What do you like about cats?" or "What kind of love relation is there between you and your cat?". But my point is not how you get there but what makes a notion a real issue, a really significant notion. And the issue here is: I'm a cat lover. Cat lovers nurture character not devotedness - as dog lovers do. And here you have your tension. The tricky thing is: the tension seems to be outside the category, somewhere you wouldn't have thought of. Who thinks of dogs when he works on a cat account? Well I do now. I try to look for oppositions - even if there are no obvious oppositions involved. Oppositions constitute meaning. Cats vs dogs? Old cats vs young cats? Cat vs cat owner? Having cats vs having children? It's less a motivational tension, it's more of a tension in terms of "meaning". (Also read my older post about "meaning" as something to be found between two poles here.)

Let's try to apply this oppositional thinking to Johnnie Walker. You could start of by asking yourself: What's the difference between Whisky and Vodka. One of the answers will be: maturity issues. Maturity of the product and maturity of the drinker. Well, that's already quite close to Personal Development or Life Success, isn't it? Fascinating stuff.

The main question remains: Does all this help us planners? I actually believe that almost none of those ideas has actually been derived or discussed that way. They have not been discussing Human Inertia before the idea of "Keep Walking" was there, have they. Once it was there - they might have. Though probably not - managers tend to be allergic to negative formulations. Most people are. 

Well you see - I don't care if they had talked about it. Their brains had processed it that way anyhow. "Tension = interesting. No Tension = less interesting." It doesn't matter if others use these patterns explicitly - maybe you could. So, keep it secret and practice a bit. 

Tension here: if it doesn't work I shouldn't tell anyone about it. If it works... maybe I shouldn't tell anybody?

Also read this text here about problems as primary objects of good planning by Martin Weigl.