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In this edition:

• Column: Problem-Finders Are Just As Valuable As Problem-Solvers

• Inspiration: Perspective on Jaguar’s Rebrand

• Upcoming: WARC’s “The Future of Strategy”

Column: Problem-Finders Are Just As Valuable As Problem-Solvers

A whole generation of talent was raised on the idea of "bring me solutions, not problems", and I believe that has had a brutal impact on our ability to solve for the right things.

Think about it — when was the last time someone in your company was recognized for identifying the right problem? Typically we put problem-solvers on the pedestal and I think this is a shame.

We shouldn't stop rewarding great problem-solvers. They are a key part of the equation, though only half of it.

For some reason we feel uncomfortable sitting with a problem for long without trying to solve it. And what we end up seeing are managers frenetically running around solving “problems”, under the illusion that they’re being productive for their organizations.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Problem Gestation

When we think about the strategic planning process, what we have is a series of steps that lead us to a game plan for whatever length of time we’re planning for.

This typically involves a diagnosis phase, where we review results from previous years, conduct new research, and draw some key insights from it.

Following that, we would then move on to actually developing a strategy that takes those insights into account, before finally putting forward a plan that brings that strategy to life through a series of tactics, projects, and initiatives.

Where things typically fall apart isn’t at any one particular phase — there is no shortage of cases leading back to bad research, poor choices being made, and terrible tactics being developed.

The common thread of bad plans typically connects back to the organization solving the wrong problems to begin with.

There is no silver-bullet here on how to avoid this, except for giving yourself enough time to think about what the actual problem is.

This period of "problem gestation", as I like to call it, is so important because time is the only thing that enables us to wrestle with a challenge, look at it from different angles, peel away its layers and various parts, and fully immerse ourselves in the project at hand.

Oftentimes this leads us to reframe the challenge, uncover meatier and more interesting problems to solve for, and see things that our competition — who is restlessly running around "being productive" - isn't seeing.

So often I see managers frantically solving problems that have landed on their desks, only to realize months later and at a significant cost that they have been solving the wrong problem all along.

But how we go about being “productive” during this problem gestation phase?

Idle Productivity

In business, we often think of idling as an unproductive activity.

But that is a broken line of thinking because it wrongly assumes that knowledge workers operate like assembly line workers — pumping out as many ideas and solutions as possible in the shortest amount of time.

The realities of knowledge workers abide by a different set of incentives altogether. One key insight can unlock hockey-stick growth. A single hour presenting to a room of 1,000 prospects can yield 10x the results of 10 1 to 1 meetings. Programmatic ad delivery allows a company to sell to thousands of people at the same time and its success hinges on the work of a creative person nailing the message and visuals of the spot — what could take 100 hours or 30 minutes.

You see, the mind doesn’t abide to the laws of physics. Productivity in knowledge work isn’t an additive equation — it’s a multiplication.

Let’s take a look at how one might measure success of marketing initiatives in an organization as an example.

Econometrics in marketing is the application of statistical and mathematical models to analyze and quantify the relationships between marketing activities and business outcomes. Most econometric models look something like this:

• S = K + aP + bD + cA

Where S is sales or share, K is a constant which we have to add to the rest of the equation to get the right baseline, P is some measure of price, D is some measure of distribution, A is some measure of advertising output, and a, b, c are numbers we have to multiply each independent variable by to relate them to S. Let’s go further and make it real:

• S example: Sales revenue in dollars for a specific product or brand during a particular period.

• P example: The price of the product expressed as a percentage of the average market price (e.g., 120% of the average market price if the product is premium-priced).

• D example: The percentage of retail outlets or locations where the product is available (e.g., the product is available in 80% of grocery stores in a region).

• A example: The advertising spend for the product during the period, expressed in dollars or as gross rating points (GRPs) for television campaigns.

• K example: A baseline sales figure representing the sales expected even without significant changes in price, distribution, or advertising (e.g., $10,000 in sales based on brand loyalty or recurring purchases).

• a, b, c examples:

  • a: The sensitivity of sales to price changes (e.g., a = -200, meaning every 1% increase in price reduces sales by $200).

  • b: The sensitivity of sales to distribution (e.g., b = 50, meaning every 1% increase in distribution coverage boosts sales by $50).

  • c: The sensitivity of sales to advertising spend (e.g., c = 300, meaning every $1,000 increase in advertising spend increases sales by $300).

As you can see with this geeky example, the power of a, b, c is disproportionally higher than all the rest because they are multiplicative. And if we hone in on the variable c for example, what makes an advert effective is primarily a combination of creative quality, targeting accuracy, how much of the audience are we able to reach, and the size of the brand. In other words:

• c = 0.47(Creative) + 0.15(Brand Size) + 0.22(Reach) + 0.05(Recency) + 0.09(Targeting) + 0.02(Context)

So, as a creative in the ad industry, your impact on sales can be disproportionally higher than the rest of the organization if you land on a really great idea that will capture attention and get talked about.

And this can happen in the span of 6 months or 6 hours.

In other words, time isn’t a determinant variable, but more so a contextual requirement that has zero correlation with the degree of success of a campaign.

These findings then leads us to the crux of a high-performing creative culture: idle time to think, ponder, and get inspired has tangible positive effects on how effective the work can be.

What Comes Before Creative

Now that we understand the relationship between time and business results in a creative culture, we then need to understand what comes before creative.

Think of creative as the solution-finding department of an agency. They’re given a problem to solve and they come up with brilliant ideas to over-deliver on the objectives tied to that problem.

But if the problem they’re given to solve for is the wrong problem to begin with, then the entire mathematical exercise we just went through above gets reduced to close to zero.

Sure, an ad campaign that addresses the wrong problem might still yield some sales uplift, but if the real S to solve for wasn’t sales and instead was a lift in associations with “being trustworthy” for example, then in all likelihood we’ve failed the assignment.

Therefore, identifying the "right" problem to solve is a critical skill in the arsenal of any strategist.

Nothing gets me more excited than when someone uncovers an overlooked, hyper interesting problem that hasn't yet been solved for. This is what gives life to iconic work — such as “Got Milk”, which uncovered that the real problem to solve for wasn’t to get people to drink more glasses of milk, but instead to ensure they always had milk stocked up to pair it with something else. This small shift in the framing of the problem was the difference between creating ads that depicted people drinking milk while working out and ads that depicted people failing to speak properly with a mouthful of cookies because they didn’t have milk handy to wash it down.

To land on such meaty insights as Got Milk’s example above, one must understand the category in and out, talk to lots of consumers, have a great pulse on popular culture, and be able to not only think rationally about the signals they’re getting but also make lateral jumps in thinking to turn the mundane into something interesting.

This exercise of finding the right problem for the creatives to solve takes time — it takes carving out a period for “problem gestation” where the strategist gets to think about it while walking their dog, bounce ideas off their friends over beers on a Friday night, watch something interesting on TV that sparks an unexpected thought, and so on.

When a creative brief contextualizes a mundane problem with lots of potential for disruption within an interesting frame of mind, the strategist is effectively leading the creatives to the place to dig for gold.

While striking gold is what gets talked about, without a proper map of where to find it one can only hope that they’ll get lucky.

This Goes Beyond Advertising

While the world of advertising is where this concept of “problem-finding” is most prominent, the practice of looking for the “right problem” to solve for is a skill that can be adopted widely across the organization.

However, the types of problems I'm talking about are more complex than ones that can be reduced to a "to-do list" (e.g., our landing page is bugging out, we need to fix it ASAP). I'm talking about those higher level strategic problems that set the direction for an organization or a marketing campaign.

We're too quick to say "we have an awareness problem", or "consumers just don't understand so we need to educate them", or "we have a conversion problem", or “competitor X is stealing our market share”, etc.

The problem is typically more entrenched than those high-level statements. And it's only when we get to deeper depths that we can truly begin wrestling with challenges that will yield effective solutions.

In a world full of answers, those who are asking the right questions hold the keys to greener pastures.

Inspiration: Perspective on Jaguar’s Rebrand

Last week Jaguar broke the internet with a teaser ad of its rebrand into an EV future.

At first glance, it was a visually provoking ad, with lots of vivid colours and intriguing characters inhabiting a wonderworld of limitless possibilities to the soundtrack of a futuristic tune. Truly a conceptual teaser.

“Create exuberant”. “Live vivid”. “Delete ordinary”. “Break moulds”. “Copy nothing”.

For an almost 100 year brand, this was quite the departure from its British, luxurious roots.

The brand had been struggling to make money on its cars, and even Ford — its previous owner — chose to walk away from it by selling it to Tata Motors back in 2008.

With that context in mind, even those who had never spent a day thinking about Jaguar in their lives, weighed in with their takes

This has led Jaguar to see a 5-year spike in search terms, as Nico Neumann describes below, pointing out the fact that while all this mental availability can be beneficial, none of it will be captured because they also have ZERO physical availability at this moment.

I must say that find these hot takes a bit boring, particularly because most pundits are just looking at this from a purely aesthetic lens (unlike Nico above) — as if the brand could be reduced to just its logo.

Yes — is it shocking when a brand walks away from almost 100 years of brand equity, and chooses to go after a segment of the market that quite frankly can’t even afford their products? Yes, it is.

But the Jaguar brand is much larger than that. Think about its 4Ps and you’ll quickly reach the conclusion that judging a brand’s promotional activities while still being 2 years out of having a product in the market is plain silly.

What if the product ends up being truly “exuberant” and “unordinary”? What if the battery range ends up being something we’ve never seen before? What if Jaguar is moving into its new chapter as a leading EV car maker?

These are all “what ifs” and I am not saying that they will come to fruition. But judging a brand solely based on its communications reduces the marketing discipline to colours and logos.

But we must also remember that this is not the first time Jaguar has changed its identity. As a matter of fact, the “leaping jaguar” didn’t make an appearance until 1982:

So, here we are — holding our breaths. And I hope that Jaguar sticks this landing and delivers one of the biggest STFUs of all time. But that’s yet to be seen.

Until then, I am hesitant to critique this pivot without first seeing their line up of EVs being announced on December 2nd at Miami Art Week.

Rory Sutherland gives a pretty good take on this whole situation, which I largely agree with:

Upcoming: WARC’s “The Future of Strategy”

“Grow Your Brain” is an APG Canada initiative in which I interview folks across client, tech, and industry bodies in a relaxed lunch and learn format to gain insights that could be useful for fellow strategists.

If you haven’t had a chance to dive into the findings from WARC's Future of Strategy Report, have no fear. We’ve got you covered.

Join us on Dec 5th via Zoom as Pedro Porto Alegre (yours truly) gets the inside scoop from WARC on what the future of strategy is looking like.

We’ll talk about the challenges that strategy as a discipline is facing, how to cultivate a culture in which it can thrive, and opportunities for it to grow into an exciting future.

Register here!

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • Marketing Commoditized Categories

  • The Art Of Giving Effective Creative Feedback

  • How To Write Effective Creative Briefs

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.