Impacts

How to become a strategic ‘pretty picture’ person

Strategy | Comments | Last built on 20 January, 2010

Originally made for the Australian design community at Australian INFront.

Your right brain is a wonderful thing.

Largely misunderstood, it makes conceptual, visual and word connections that people who don’t do what you do for a living often can’t make. And, because of that, it earns you a living.

Thing is, your clients are probably extreme left-brain types. The rational, processes, systems and structure matter to them. And while they admire and understand the value of your right brain, the truth is that it also probably scares them a little.

The chasm between the right and left can often play out in frustrating ways: the right-brained gets frustrated because the left-brained ‘doesn’t get ideas’; the right-brained complains that the left-brained ‘doesn’t understand my business’.

If you’re stuck in this chasm with a client now, try the below.

1. Talk numbers

Make sure you know how your client makes money. Know how their sales are going. Know how their competitors’ sales are going. Know how the industry (or category) they’re in is performing and what share of the category they currently have.

Then, depending on the type of work you’re doing for your client, try to establish a financial goal. To do this, you (and they) will need to know a few key things:

The lifetime value of a customer

A car manufacturer may find, on average, that people buy 2.5 cars from them in their lifetimes, and service them with the manufacturer 4 times in the first few years. This may make the company $10,000 in profit. This is their net lifetime value (simplistically speaking).

Expected return on marketing investment

Most companies with business savvy will have an expectation around what money they expect back from any money they invest. Typically this ratio comes from a textbook someone studied at university or through trial and error.

Marketing allowable

Let’s say, based on the example above, this company expects a return at a ratio of 4:1. That is, for every dollar they spend they expect $4 back. This means that to earn their $10,000 in profit they should be willing to spend $2,500. A lot of companies haven’t established these numbers; some know them but don’t want to share them because their aim is to drive down costs while getting valuable customers (ie they keep you in the dark and try to get cheaper services from you). If you’re a marketer reading this, try sharing this information with your agencies/suppliers because it could change their entire approach to your business.

Often marketing budgets are set based on a percentage of annual revenue (5-10% is common). Then, for those involved with advertising campaigns there’s been a traditional 4:1 ratio of media spend to production spend. So you may get a brief with these arbitrarily made budgets and ratios stipulated that actually don’t take into account the business opportunity – including the lifetime value of a customer, ROI and marketing allowable.

Based on a $2,500 marketing allowable for a car, maybe your ‘creative solution’ is actually to hire ten people to drive to schools in a particular suburb and offer mums free test drives after the morning drop-off. Who knows? The point is that being able to speak these numbers will help your clients realise that you’re focused on results and not just ‘pretty pictures’.

2. Show numbers

There is an abundance of free data out there now. If I was you I’d make keyword research part of every project. It helps you understand how people research your client’s products. You’d be wise to reflect some of that behaviour and language back in any communication.

Google Adwords is a free tool from Google that now shows approximate numbers for monthly searches. If your client is Australian, be sure to change the settings to Australia then ‘show’ the Local search volume.

Google Insights is a great tool to look at search trends over a period of time.

And, if you make the internet, you could get use out of this free data from Forrester that describes how Australians behave online: Social Technographics.

You can find a tonne more here: Delicious bookmarks.

3. Paint a picture

So you’ve got your head around the business numbers and the customer behaviour numbers. Next, show them what their competitors are doing. Show them what companies overseas are doing – show them the best. Then summarise in ten points what best practice is.

Have a long-term vision for what you can help your client with, an ambition. What can you help them be best at? Again, connect a number to it.

As far as a brief strategic presentation… define the problem/opportunity (don’t use words like ‘drive sales’; talk plainly – ‘people think our shoes fall apart’). Find an insight to exploit (an insight being an ‘unspoken human truth’ – ie saying ‘mums are time-poor’ is not insightful; saying ‘mums are time-poor because being busy makes them feel better about themselves’ – completley made up – is more poignant). Show any consumer research you’ve done – show video, show consumer quotes. Then tell them what the strategy is. Again, talk plainly. Avoid words like ‘empowerment’, ‘enrich’, those fluffy marketing poetics that nobody really understands. That’s unaccountable strategy. Say it in a sentence (a ‘to/by’ format is sometimes useful).

Then…

4. Show it’s kind of been done before

Obviously, real creativity brings something new into the world. A lateral thought. But I find it’s good to show 3 examples of campaigns or designs that are just a little bit like what we want to do. For instance, if I’m presenting some video content ideas I may show Will it Blend or the T-Mobile flash mob. Again, I’ll summarise in a handful of points why these examples were successful and then what I present as a new idea will apply these principles.

5. Show your thinking

Regardless of what field you’re in, being able to describe an idea in 25 words or less, a logline, is really useful before you show any visuals. Show some inspiration along the way – photos, screengrabs, words. This is all about story-telling – from the numbers through to the visuals.

What do you think?
Is there anything you’d add to the above? Anything you disagree with?

If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy How to get into strategy.

Photo courtesy Pier Mario under a Commons Licence.

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