Rory and I have been having a stimulating and gently-warmed email debate about the value of ’strategy’ (props to Iain Tait for reporting the quote that kicked it all off), following our recent efforts to codify our research principles. This pub argument is now spilling out into a full street brawl as we invite you (Team Rubber and the world) to throw in your thoughts. Here’s the story so far, warts’n'all (take a deep breath!):
From: Rory Ahern
Subject: What do you make of this?
It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of “strategy” but of common sense, taste and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this, and create gargantuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security.
From: Ben Whitnall
Subject: Re: What do you make of this?
I disagree. I’m split on any further opinion…
Being generous: that’s written by someone who’s fortunate to have the kind of mind that is continually creating strategy but in such an instinctive/well-rehearsed way that they’ve never noticed it or stopped noticing it and assume that it’s just coming naturally to them/is being self-effacing about it. If they were objectively critiqued, they’d probably have to give themselves a lot more credit.
Being cynical: that’s written by someone who’s sure that they’ve got the best taste in the world and are bitter about continually losing to other people who ‘write pages and pages of stuff to cover up their rubbish central idea’. They’re not willing to concede that actually people who make a lot of money doing this stuff aren’t messing around and know that knowing what they’re talking about is the best way to have a successful business.
Also, in either case, clients should be unnerved by ambiguity and should hold you to account for your idea. If you can’t explain in an articulate and arguable (and, ideally, evidenced) way why your idea is good then either you need to find someone to help you deconstruct your own ideas, you need to stop being so lazy or you need to have a better idea.
From: Rory Ahern
Interesting.
Because I quite liked it.
Strategy is undeniably a very useful (if not essential) thing to have in place at the start of a project but I would argue not to the exclusion of intuition/ inspiration/ serendipity etc.
Most agencies and clients will say that some of their best work has occurred by going off-brief because invariably you will start thinking differently to your competition (who’ll all swear by their strategy).
Where briefs and strategy are essential are to agree a common goal - we need to sell XXXX products, we need to be the most front of mind brand etc.
Research will focus you to know everything you need to know about your product/ market/ audience but it’s an unquantifiable creative ingredient that will give you the magic to make something truly engaging. Good research usually means you can then discount the obvious product claims because they’ve either been made already or the competition can claim the same/better.
I saw a Colgate ad on last night and it made me think of our conversation yesterday because although it promised a USP and clearly tied into something research had proved was the most compelling benefit of that particular toothpaste it was eminently forgettable. By the same stroke is Mentos profile/ upward sales curve since the Coke fountains phenomenon any less valid.
I guess my POV is strategy is definitely good discipline but it is not always the only way to get a great piece of communication. And it is more often than not the justification for rather mediocre communication so I’m wary of how reverential one should be to it.
Backatcha!
From: Ben Whitnall
I think some of this is just semantics: as I was trying, clumsily, to explain in my last email, a good piece of communication will always have a strategy, it’s just that sometimes it won’t have been made explicit, written down anywhere or even necessarily made it into the consciousness of the person devising it. To my mind, inspiration, having an idea dawn on you and going through a laborious, deliberate process of research and reasoning are all just strategising happening at different speeds. The ‘inspired’ creative idea will also be discoverable by a slow and steady process and will still have all the connections between product, idea, message and media asset, it’s just that the person coming up with it made a leap in logic, fast-forwarding them to the idea.
It’s like Beckett: if you had someone describe his fragmented, non-sequitirial, broken writing style to you, you’d assume it was terrible communication. However, he understood that the human consciousness is fragmented and non-sequitirial and broken and imperfectly translates stuff from the subconscious/the internal. By acknowledging that process and sending an accordingly scrambled signal, he kind of hotwired the ideas to hit straight in at that subconscious level — incredibly brilliant communication. And that’s a strategy.
This makes time a key element; I’m certain that you could, by careful and reasoned progress, write the same lines that Beckett did, but you’d probably only manage one or two in a lifetime. Once he’d figured out this kind of ‘aporia’ strategy, he was able to jump straight in and out of it like a character and write it ‘naturally’. C.S. Lewis talks about doing the same kind of thing when writing as his demon character in The Screwtape Letters, and Johnson was on to a similar sort of thing when he said of Gulliver’s Travels ‘once you have little people and big people, the rest writes itself’. They’re like shortcuts to an incredibly strong strategy. That’s why I think Matt’s on to something when he talks about finding a ‘through line’ for viral film ideas — if you can package all the strategy into an easy-to-extrapolate concept, you make it possible to get a lot more done quickly. I still insist that there isn’t a good piece of communication out there that functions on some different plane of rationality, that is completely disconnected from reason and logic and that a ‘eureka’ moment can magically transport you to.
That’s why a key thing for me is being able to deconstruct, understand, reverse engineer and recreate these high-speed strategic processes. It’s what lets you become a Tiger Woods-esque consistent, fearsome champion, rather than ’skating around on the uncertain surface of brilliance’. Anyone can fluke a hole in one or stumble some incredible ice-skating manouevre. The point is, if you managed it once, it must be, somehow, within your capacity to do it again. The skill is in understanding it, practicing it, fine-tuning it until you can do it every single time. If you show someone your amazing idea but aren’t able to explain the strategy, it might not necessarily weaken that idea but it does show that it was a fluke and that you won’t be coming up with another one any time soon.
Phew. I like debates.
