A prospecting shaft. Mch. 26. Claim 44 below Discovery, Hunker Creek (1901) by Joseph Burr Tyrrell, 1858-1957, CC: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

Strategic brand ideas are rarely linear textbook answers; they often call for an original reframing of the problem or reinvention of the rules. Strategy is sometimes called “The creative before the creative”, but fundamentally both share a similar ambition – the quest for breakthrough ideas.
Breakthrough thinking is just as mysterious as breakthrough creativity – the two are intertwined. And while there have been attempts at exploring it, you won’t be surprised to know that there are no recipes. However, occasionally there are some useful tools and models.

One of my favourite descriptions of the quest for breakthrough ideas, highly applicable to design thinking, is found in David Perkins’ book “The Eureka Effect: The Art And Logic Of Breakthrough Thinking”.
Perkins constructs a model of breakthrough thinking based on the analogy of digging for gold in the Klondike. During the gold rush, everybody is looking for gold, and there are various methods of digging for it. When you find gold, if you have even little experience, you’ll know you’ve hit gold. But the big question is “how do you know where to dig?”

In that tricky terrain, the breakthrough answers and brilliant ideas are out there somewhere, but to get to them, the creative thinker must confront four types of thinking traps: Continue reading →

(Disclaimer: Even though I say it somewhere else on this site, the opinions here are always my own)

While working on an article about brand ecosystems, I came across an interview Diageo CMO Andy Fennell recently gave to Marketing magazine.

Here are some choice quotes:

– Given your marketing challenges, what type of agency do you need today?

There’s one thing that we will always need from our agencies – brilliant creative ideas. That’s what we are buying – big ideas, full of flair to surprise our consumers. At Diageo, when we work with an agency it is the number one priority. Sure, account servicing and all that stuff is relevant. But the reason we buy an agency’s service is because of its creative flair.

That said, we can no longer segment the different aspects of an idea in the way that we used to. We need agencies that can see the totality of our engagement with the consumer, whether that is blogger outreach, social networking conversations, long-form content or more traditional advertising. Almost always, we need agencies collaborating with each other around what we end up showing to the consumer.

There are very few, if any, agencies that are able to do everything. So, we need our lead agencies to be able to see the whole idea and collaborate with partners in order to deliver to the consumer something that joins together and makes sense. We talked about integrated marketing for years. It’s been a buzzword in agency land. Now it is absolutely required. If it’s not integrated, the consumer rejects it.

– If it’s all about getting consumers to participate, do you still need big campaigns?

Not big advertising campaigns, but we need big brand ideas. When you have more and more people collaborating, you need a big idea to hold it together. The difference now is that you don’t start with an ad campaign. You start with an idea that allows people to participate – so we talk about ‘participating platforms’.

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You can read the rest here.

No big surprises for brand agencies there, you might say, but here is a thought…

When the entire marketing world becomes hyper-integrated and idea-driven, two of the core elements that used to set apart Brand(/ing) Agencies in the past become hygienic to the entire creative industry.

The concept of having a “Brand agency” in such a world, makes as much sense as having a “Positioning Agency” or a “Differentiation Agency”. Branding is just too important as a mode of thinking in marketing to be fenced off and left only for one type of agency. Continue reading →