Telling complex stories.
A conversation yesterday reminded me of some of the side benefits to our business…
It’s often a lot less expensive to do something than it is to say something. It’s often much cheaper to create a service than it is to create a piece of communication. We ran into this recently with one of our clients. We were able to propose a service that cost an order of magnitude less than an advertising proposal they were evaluating.
Because of this, and because of the fact that it’s very difficult to research services in the abstract – our research methodology has typically been: build, test and learn. Rather than spending lots of money in researching an idea, it’s been far more economic to simply build the idea and then research the actual product.
In addition to the financial benefit this brings, it also tends to improve the quality of the idea. Instead of ideas being launched and forgotten, ideas are launched and refined, using real customer/user feedback (in the real world not in a focus group facility). Importantly, they are sharpened, based on what people do with them, not what people say they’re going to do with them.
Our clients are helped competitively by being able to refine their programs quietly and gain a large head-start instead of launching ideas prematurely.
And, when ideas are finally launched, they are more complete, more polished and have a history of performance and success behind them.
I think of this chain as an ecosystem of benefits. It’s a quality that the best ideas always have. Rather than delivering on one objective, our best ideas tend to solve multiple problems. They tend to create value in a number of different ways. It has become so obvious that it is now a criteria against which I evaluate ideas. If they’re only good for one thing, there’s probably something missing. We need to look harder to push the idea more. (If it’s a really good idea, it gets even better the more it’s defined.)
This complexity is true of many of the things we encounter on a daily basis. It is true of everything we see in nature, it is true of many of the products and services we use and consume on a daily basis and it is true of the interactions we have with those around us.
Perhaps the only thing is isn’t true of is marketing communications practice and theory.