[ SCENARIO ANALYSIS ]
WHAT IS IT?
Scenario analysis is a way to anticipate and think through the impact of each option we recommend to our client. In our context, it allows the designer to create options based on a feature of the product or aspect of competition in the business category and present it with the risks and potential rewards of going with each option.
For example, as designers, we often generate what seems like hundreds of sketches before selecting three options to present our clients. If we are freelancing, it’s usually one job, three options for one price. The job could range from an app interface to a brand identity, but three options with an agreed-upon number of revisions is usually the case. At best, these options are not just variations of the same thing, they are Rhinoceros, Rainbow, and Rhombus—in other words, completely different ways to solve the same problem:
The Rhinoceros option may have been inspired by the strength of the product we are creating for.
The Rainbow option may have come from the colors available or the variety of uses for the product.
The unique shape of the product may differentiate it from the competitors and may have inspired the Rhombus option.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Scenario analysis is important because if your client is a market leader on the basis of the strength of their product, but sales are suggesting that consumers are also valuing aesthetics nowadays, you could advise on the risks and rewards of going with Rhombus over Rhinoceros. I’ve found in my career that though everyone has an opinion, clients will pay for your analysis. It’s also important to be able to say with authority that you are recommending these options because the client needs them and not because you are trying to sell them something. As the expert, you make the recommendations but scenario analysis allows the client to make informed decisions.
WHAT JOB TITLE/ROLE IS CONCERNED WITH THIS?
Scenario analysis is relevant to freelance designers, creative directors, or whoever is presenting and justifying the work during a pitch or presentation.
FOR MORE ON THE SUBJECT
Read Developing Business Strategies by David A. Aaker.
[ CREATIVE STRATEGY FRAMEWORK ]
WHAT IS IT?
In my experience, creatives often either get incomplete information or are bombarded with too much information. I found it difficult to do my creative job in both cases: when I had to work to fill in the gaps or to sift through the irrelevant parts of the information overload. So I created this simple tool for organizing and extracting insights called the “creative strategy framework.”
The framework uses four columns to help you organize the elements involved in developing creative work and focus on seeing the threads that exist between creativity and strategy:
Target
Facts (on the brand, product, or service)
Feature/Benefit
Message or Objective (depending on the priority)
We’ll learn much more about this framework in Chapters 6 and 7.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
The most practical way I’ve used this tool is in a kickoff meeting, when we are sitting with the client to learn about the project. Often, we must play detective in our research because the briefing process and people involved only give us pieces of the puzzle we are being tasked with solving. Having the chart in front of you to organize your notes helps begin the process of developing relevant solutions that are on brand, on strategy, and on message. You’ll also be able to tell if you’re missing information, so you can ask for it right at the meeting.
This tool is flexible because the resulting strategic threads can be used to inspire creative work—for example, in writing a creative brief or in developing creative concepts.
WHAT JOB TITLE/ROLE IS CONCERNED WITH THIS?
Creative strategist, writers, creative directors, art directors, and designers could find value in this framework in their process. Whoever is tasked with gathering information, briefing the creative team, or inspiring the team through writing the creative brief should be versed in extracting informed insights. This tool can help.
FOR MORE ON THE SUBJECT
Visit www.mydesignshop.com/creative-strategy-framework-design-tutorial for an in-depth tutorial.
Turning Words Into Inspiration
Now that you’ve been exposed to the words behind the pictures or the strategy behind the execution, it’s time to think about how you can apply these concepts in your day-to-day creative work. As you go through this book, you’ll see the greatest results if you read with the intention to reapply the concepts in some way immediately. To help you do that, think about which concepts, definitions, or tools in this recap are most relevant to your current job, project, or client work. As you do that, remember:
These terms might be called something slightly different in certain companies.
Feel free to refer back to this chapter as often as you need to.
Practice using the terms so you become more comfortable with them.
2 Emerging from the Cocoon
The Benefits of a Strategic Approach
I got a call one day while sitting in my apartment in Manhattan. A longtime marketer in the business who awarded me a scholarship while I was at NYU had an assistant who was on the other line. She said, “I’m now a marketing manager for a small but growing employee staffing company and we need a new positioning and identity materials to update our offering. I’d love to get your recommendation on any design firms we could consider to send our request for proposal.”
“Absolutely!” I said, as I rattled off the top-tier design and branding firms known around the world but based in New York (Carbone Smolan, Pentagram, Wolff Olins, Landor, Interbrand, FutureBrand, Chermayeff & Geismar). I was completely confident that any one of these could exceed all expectations. I was positive that for a truckload of money, my old friend would be buying the best work the industry had to offer. After finishing my list and just before hanging up the phone, I heard “—and feel free to throw your hat in the ring; I know you do the work we need as well.”
At that point it occurred to me that the award from years ago flagged me as both a contact in New York and a credible professional in the business. After hanging up the phone, my first boss in advertising immediately popped into my head. We had kept in touch over the years. I had long since moved on from that first job, but I never forgot the work we did under his direction and still admired him for the way he approached advertising through design. I realized it would be a great time to partner with him and the usual talent suspects in his orbit once again. We’d all worked together and enjoyed the freedom and risks we could take together. So I made the call, and between the two of us, we had the creative and conceptual skills needed to credibly throw our hats in the ring.
Our motley crew pulled together a capabilities presentation of relevant case studies, and built a team of people who would work on the business should we win. The client flew up and we pitched in a small rented office in Chelsea. After one more pitch we were awarded the work. Winning the business couldn’t have gone better. Former co-workers. Talent who had worked on numerous well-known global accounts. Complete confidence in our ability to create a beautiful new identity the client asked for . . . if only we could agree on what the strategic parts were.
Disagreeing That We Agree: Tactical versus Strategic
Our discord was one that I imagine many a creative team has when trying to get on the same page about strategy. In this case, we weren’t in agreement on what strategy actually was. The client asked for “positioning” and some on the team thought that writing a tagline would be sufficient to satisfy this part of the request. However, a positioning is, by definition, a strategic exercise and therefore should never be customer-facing. It is a part of what I’ve been calling “the words behind the pictures” or the “strategy behind the execution.”
This disagreement made the process of arriving at either a specific positioning or a broad strategy
a struggle.
On one hand, the veterans I was working with had been in the business much longer than I had. Their experience building well-known brands by conceptualizing and designing their well-known campaigns was why I wanted to partner with them in the first place. I learned quite a bit about being a creative by working with them and watching them present. I had deep respect for the way they approached the work from a creative perspective. And that is what they were doing now—taking an execution-oriented approach, which consisted of creating a tagline and building a campaign around it.
THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING ON STRATEGY
The veterans’ approach had worked for them in the past, but at this point, I knew that the business required more from us. I had a deep understanding of marketing strategy, and though I was the “digital guy” on the team, I had valid opinions on how and why we should arrive at the overall strategic foundation. To build a campaign based on strategy, we needed to get deeper into the category to understand the landscape, including the competition and their strategic positions. From there, we could find a white-space opportunity or point of difference to build our positioning around. Next, we’d crystalize our insight into a client-facing positioning statement that would inspire all consumer-facing elements (including the tagline).
This process creates clarity on managing the brand. It would then inspire the work we were hired to do, and also help us advise the client on what they shouldn’t do in the future. With a strong strategic foundation, the brand could be managed after our project and this would provide guideposts for anyone who came after us to understand what was and what was not conducive to strengthening the brand.
THE DRAWBACKS OF CREATING WITHOUT STRATEGY
Don’t get me wrong; great campaign concepts have been made by simply writing a tagline or sentence that helps focus or sum up what the campaign is about. On this surface level, tactical creativity aligns with the brand and those are essentially the only words behind the pictures. What you see is what you get. Using this method, the creative team is united about what they think works creatively and strategically. However, I’ve found that it also makes for two big problems:
First, it leaves the creatives having to fight everyone else on the pitch team to keep them out of the work. At this point, it is us, the creative group, against everybody else on the internal team. From the creativity standpoint, this is the perfect solution because we creatives have the power. The drawbacks to this approach are that it could undermine the overall firm and defeat the purpose of having business or strategic expertise available. Big, creative personalities often get their way.
This dynamic leads to a perpetually subjective scenario built on trusting individuals for trust’s sake. As in, “Just trust me!” There are no arguments based in fact; it’s just throwing weight around. At that point, there might as well be an announcer with a microphone proclaiming, “Let the combative tension-filled interactions and subjective disagreements commence!” You can smell fear in the air in every meeting when everyone is being told essentially to stay in their lane. Egos are now involved because the focus is on defending my idea versus meeting the client request in an objective and strategic way. At worst these discussions create internal factions based on job function where rank is pulled and posturing is practiced. I like the blue logo! I like the red! In this type of environment, the client’s request that got us into the room is buried under the preferences in the room.
Furthermore, because the execution-oriented solution was developed without sound strategic roots, the team with this approach presents the client with two choices:
Stay now and leave later. Why? The client who asks for a tactical element (like a tagline) is trying to accomplish a strategic goal even if they don’t know it yet. When that tactical element fails to achieve that strategic goal, the conclusion is that your work is at fault.
or
Leave now for a more strategic partner. Strategy is why the client left whoever had their business before they searched for your firm, so strategy is a large part of the reason you’ll lose it.
If the client chooses to “stay now,” and go with that subjectivity for the short term, it’s usually on the strength of the creative idea, without well-reasoned rules on managing their brand consistently going forward. This approach produces a less cohesive overall brand, because its premise was based on the opinion of someone inside the creative team and not the target. What happens if that person leaves, is fired, or makes a different decision concerning what they like? If you’ve ever wondered why a new communication from a brand didn’t sound familiar in tone or look as if it belonged to the brand in some way, it could be the result of not having a sound strategic foundation.
This choice also leaves the account vulnerable to the client’s whims and subjectivity on matters that they should leave up to the creative team. At this point, each interaction is as fun as a trip to the dentist’s office to remove yet another molar. In the end, the client’s trust in the creative’s subjective opinion only lasts so long, because if the client goals and metrics weren’t reached, they blame you.
To put it another way, it’s like the difference between going with the cellular data plan that sounds good on a commercial versus calling the phone company, asking them to look at your data usage for the last six months, and deciding based on what you actually use. Without a real strategic process, the “strategy” consists of why certain words, typefaces, or colors were selected—and though all of these tangible aspects of a brand are important, they aren’t a strategic foundation.
Emerging from the Cocoon
After learning the language of business, I had a more complete understanding of how to develop positioning based on research. This new perspective made it impossible for me to justify creative recommendations that were not rooted in strategy. As a result, I found it difficult to fit into a rigid execution-only role because my approach now required an insight inspired from research, and when the research was weak or nonexistent, I challenged it.
In the case of my opening story, though the client was happy with the design and application, we only solved 50 percent of the brief because of the tactical impulse to create. As a result, we provided short-term tactical decisions instead of a sound strategic foundation that enables long-term brand management. Despite my objections and history with this rockstar creative team, ultimately our team didn’t understand the value of arriving at a back-end strategy before creating the front-end solutions. As a result, it is my opinion that we failed to offer a long-term positioning that the client could use to manage their brand into the future. You may experience this impulse in your teams. It expresses itself in various ways, such as a failure to listen to each other or an unwillingness to consider other approaches to the problem. Sure, you can encounter stubborn personalities on any team, but without an objective strategic approach based on research, you won’t be able to move the conversation toward a constructive discussion about the client objectives. People might still get emotional about what they like, but you have a way out of difficult conversations: facts. If you don’t have facts and strategy behind you, eventually it becomes clear that you’re just arguing for a creative idea, not a creative business solution.
The Long-Term Advantages of the Strategic Approach
As you’re learning, approaching a creative job from a strategic standpoint is much more effective. Yes, it takes longer in terms of up-front research, but it yields better results—both for the immediate campaign and for future endeavors. Consider the following situations, and notice the difference between the tactical (execution-based) approach and the strategic one:
Tactical: Jumping into the ocean to learn how to swim.
Strategic: Taking swimming lessons.
Tactical: Eating all the M&M’s because they taste great.
Strategic: Eating things your head knows are good for your mouth.
Tactical: Letting the deadline dictate your approach to the problem.
Strategic: Budg
eting your time thoughtfully to properly explore the complete context of a problem so as to see its root cause and factoring that into the solution.
Tactical: Taking a cough suppressant for weeks.
Strategic: Testing for pneumonia.
Clearly, the strategic approach is always the better one for long-term success.
Turning Words Into Inspiration
As a creative, I believe that we should lead the client when building relationships between the brand and its target customers.
Think of the project you are working on currently, then try this exercise:
Try to identify areas where there is confusion or a lack of clarity on the strategic way forward.
Without blame, try to put your finger on the top two or three reasons why. If it will help, label them with headers such as Process, Communication, or Strategy.
After articulating the reasons, formulate a solution for each, in no more than two or three sentences each.
Lastly, add the projected impact or benefit of that solution on your creative process, product or communication. You may need a draft or two to present your point of view in the most objective language possible.
Now you are ready to identify the person most likely to be receptive to hearing your thoughts and the most opportune time to present them. Who knows—you may get fired but you may also get a chance to take the lead on implementing these solutions.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design Page 4