People Doo Doo
What creative strategy is, what it does, and why this is more complicated than it sounds
The entire discipline of ‘creative strategy’ rests on just one single observation.
You cannot make people do things.
People simply do what they want to do. They always have. They always will.
But even though you can’t make someone do something by telling them, you can in fact get them to want to do things. And once they want to, they’ll do it. This is where creative strategy comes into the picture.
Telling people to do something, explaining why they should, removing ‘key barriers’, communicating the key brand message clearly and repeatedly and in full alignment with a client’s internal documentation… None of that makes them do it.
Creative strategy, which the British call planning, is the practice of working out what to say or do that makes people want the thing the marketing needs them to want to do.
The reason advertising agencies require a whole department of strategists is that the obvious approach, which is to tell people to do the thing, just doesn’t work.
People don’t want to believe this
The reason this is so hard to land with clients is that the people you’re landing it with come from a world where telling people to do things is, in fact, how things get done.
Corporate culture is very strange. Inside it, authority works. Someone important says “I need this by Thursday” and it arrives by Thursday. They say “make the logo bigger” and the logo gets bigger. Then they say “I want the product in the first three seconds” and a very talented person who knows this is a bad idea, and whose employer pays people like me a modest salary to argue against it, puts the product in the first three seconds anyway. Because they asked. And they are senior. And that is how corporate culture works.
Corporate culture is an efficient system for getting large numbers of people to do coordinated things. But it produces a reasonable but completely wrong mental model of how human behaviour operates outside of it. Inside a corporate organisation, authority is the mechanism. Outside it, there is no mechanism. The consumer reports to nobody. The consumer has never attended a kickoff. The consumer will not do something because someone more senior than them decided they should. If a CFO walked into a bar and demanded that the guy sitting next to him produce a detailed report on his spending for the last quarter by next Tuesday, the CFO would probably get a punch in the head.
The consumer is not in this world though. Most consumers probably have no idea this world exists. The consumer cannot be directed. And so there is a gap between the people responsible for the marketing and the person supposed to respond to it.
And what fills in that gap is creative strategy, which is the discipline of figuring out what would make the consumer want the thing, not how to make them do it, because the second framing is based on a category error about what consumers are.
This is often a difficult conversation to have with someone whose day to day working life consists of the second framing working fine.
The Creatives Are Right, Annoyingly
There is another person in this story, and that is the creative.
The creative’s job is adjacent to strategy but not the same as it. The strategist figures out what would make someone want the thing. The creative figures out how to make people pay attention to that and to remember it. How to interrupt someone’s day in a way that makes them feel something rather than nothing, how to win the three seconds, which is all you get.
This is the harder job.
I am saying this as a strategist. If you are selling beer, the challenge of getting people to want beer is not an especially formidable one. An enormous proportion of the adult population already wants beer. You’re not solving a wanting problem. You’re solving an attention problem. Specifically, your beer is surrounded by hundreds of other beers also trying to occupy the same moment of the same person’s day, and that person also has a phone with an entire internet’s worth of dopamine inducing content on it.
Getting someone to want something is one problem. Getting someone to notice you saying it. Inside all the noise, against all the other beers, is a different, usually much harder, problem.
Creatives understand this. It is essentially what they think about at all times. And so the thing they’re drawn towards is singularity. Focus. One unexpected thing that slaps. Not a triangulation of creating a want. Just one thing that breaks through.
The tension here is that the one thing that grabs attention isn’t always the thing that makes someone want to do something or to want the product. Sometimes the most arresting idea is just an arresting idea. And the strategist is then in the position of asking “but does anyone want anything after this?” which is not a comfortable question to raise when someone has just done something that is impressively attention grabbing.
Most of the time this resolves in favour of the creative. And most of the time, that is the correct resolution. An ad nobody watches does nothing at all. The attention problem is the harder problem. But it’s worth pointing at this tension clearly, because pretending strategy and creative are always pointing at the same target is farcical.
The Barriers Cottage Industry
One more thing. There is a belief that has built itself into a significant amount of how advertising strategy is taught, practiced, and billed for, and the belief is this: that the way to make people do things is to remove the reasons they’re not doing them.
The word for this is barriers. People aren’t buying your product because something is in the way. The product is too expensive, or they’re not aware it exists, or they had a bad experience, or the packaging is confusing, or they haven’t fully understood the proposition. Identify the barrier. Address the barrier. The barrier being gone, people will now do the thing.
This is completely wrong.
The people not buying your product mostly aren’t buying it because they don’t want it. Not because of a barrier. And if they wanted it, they would deal with the barrier. People navigate extraordinary amounts of friction to get things they want. They queue. They fill out forms. They agree to terms and conditions without reading them. They travel across the city. The consideration phase was not the issue.
The barriers framework is seductive because it gives you something legible to do with a research budget. You can identify a barrier. You can measure whether it’s been removed. You can build a deck around it. It has the shape of creative strategy, and maybe superficially looks a bit similar. But it is not strategy. It is strategy-shaped activity that addresses a problem that was not the problem.
The problem was wanting. It is always wanting. You can’t talk someone into doing something they don’t want to do by removing the reasons they’re not doing it. You can only find the thing that makes them want it, and then they will do it, and the barrier will not come up because people do not mention barriers to things they want.
Okay So, Creative Strategy
Making people want things. Not telling them to do things. Not explaining clearly why they should. Not conducting research into why they haven’t.
Making them want it.
Creative strategy doesn’t conjure want from nothing. That’s not what it does. What it does is find the version of the truth about a product that connects with something a person already feels or needs or is looking for, and makes that connection visible enough that the want becomes actual. There is almost no product in the world where no version of wanting is available.
Everything else, like the logo size, the barriers research, the brand tracking studies, is downstream of whether you got the wanting right.