There’s always that one person who can seemingly cook up effective strategies like crazy. Across marketing, finances or life in general, the talents of such people always sell like hot cakes… but what about us lesser mortals who struggle to come up with just one solid strategy? Ideas may or may not always flow like water, but how do we determine when an idea is important or just another footnote? More importantly, how can we do this consistently? Join Wordsmith and let’s learn a few neat tricks to boost effective strategising!
Lay it all down
“Got milk?” is arguably one of the most well-known ad campaigns of the past half century – starring Sean Whalen and directed by Michael Bay (yes, that one), the iconic ad depicts Whalen struggling and failing to answer a US$10,000 question because of his mouth being glued shut with peanut butter. He ultimately fails and is left an emotional wreck due to an untimely lack of milk to wash down his overstuffed sandwich.
Milk ads have changed a lot since, and instead of communicating the overstated and obvious importance of nutritional values or the humane treatment of their dairy cows, many modern dairy commercials and campaigns are using humour as their hook (like the milk mustache).
Of course, it takes more than clever humour to get a campaign to stick around as long as “Got milk?” has! Bonnie Wan, one of the brand strategists behind the campaign, recently discussed her creative process with Minda Zetlin on Inc. magazine, and she shared that pursuing creativity at work was very much like pondering an everyday (but difficult) question like “was she still madly in love with her husband” following a 17-year marriage? After much thought, Wan admitted that she was ready to fall madly in love again, which led to a 3-step plan that could was equally applicable to creative briefs or life’s many decisions.
A daily brain dump for 2 weeks is up first.
“The first phase of creating a brief is to ‘get messy’,” recounts Wan. “That means digging into your own emotions and finding your own voice and listening to what it has to say.”
A brain dump is where you simply record all your thoughts without censorship – no matter how bizarre, off-topic or crude they may be, everything gets put on a page or a recording device. Wan recommends setting aside 10 minutes to do this exercise, but 5 minutes (or even 3 minutes) are good if you are crunched for time.
“Don’t give in to the temptation to skip or rush this step,” warns Wan. “In our culture, we have a lot of mantras like ‘have a bias for action,’ or ‘move fast and break things’.” However, rushing or only working on it sporadically defeats the purpose of the exercise – it’s essential you dedicate an “inexcusable” amount of time to do it, because you need to have enough material to work with for the next step!
Picking out patterns
From your 2-weeks of recollections, your next step is to look for patterns. “Just a collection of 14 days of brain dumps starts to reveal things,” describes Wan. She recalls her plethora of experience working as a strategist and the amount of data she had to collect and sift through – “It’s just a lot of interviews, quotes and analytics. And it isn’t until I’m able to lay it out onto a table and look at it that I can see patterns… it’s the same when we collect our thoughts through writing. We can look back at them and notice things we would not have noticed if they were only a repeated loop in our minds.”
For example, you might be contemplating leaving your company because things haven’t been going right for you. Perhaps you feel unappreciated during brainstorming, but is this actually the case? Is it possible that your ideas are consistently half-baked because you only try to come up with ideas an hour before the meeting?
Or perhaps you’re working on a brief – let’s say your ideas keep coming back to a particular style of execution despite the client having said that they couldn’t afford to do it. Are you biased because you really like the execution? Or is it because you truly believe the execution is a perfect match for the brief?
The sacred and non-negotiable patterns that you pick out are dubbed your “life brief”, Wan says. These are the elements that you absolutely should not give up on – and to ensure that they have sticking power, you need to use the right words to communicate their importance. “Your brief should inspire you and give you that feeling of yes-this-is-absolutely-right,” she points out. “The difference between a meh brief and a super motivating, exciting and invigorating one can be just a difference of words.”
It’s go time
Aside from needing the right words to motivate action, you also need to make the right moves to inspire action.
Reusing our examples above, there are many things you can do to boost your productivity prior to and during a brainstorming session. Most importantly, the amount of prep work you do will ensure that you have a certain degree of contributions. Alternatively, you could build upon ideas presented by others.
As for the problem of budgeting, are there alternative ways to create a similar execution at reduced costs? Are the client’s problems logistical or material? Are the client’s problems outdated? In which case, can new technologies or developments help? Trying to answer a question may create more questions, but a thorough investigation and doing your best to tie up loose threads will demonstrate to the client that you genuinely put effort into helping them (as opposed to just taking their problem at face value and accepting it).
“When you get clear enough to declare what you want, it automatically shifts your attention,” explains Wan. “Circumstances haven’t changed at all, but when our attention shifts, our actions follow. Just the tiniest shifts in how we show up at work or in our relationship very quickly shift the circumstances around us. They become invitations for other people to show up differently in response to us – that’s the power of creating a brief.”
A strategy is only as good as the amount of effort you put into conceptualising and making it. Be in in business or life, your briefs will hold the power to inspire change – and although no strategy is completely foolproof – at the very least, it won’t be a strategy that you regret because you didn’t think it through enough.