“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
There’s a common misconception that since part of the creative process is throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, that it is actually all there is to it. So ‘do your job,’ we tell the creative person, ‘and I’ll decide what sticks.’ If nothing sticks, then there no doubt must be something wrong with the cooking.
Other than being lazy and utterly unfair to the people doing the work for what I hope are obvious reasons that I will tell you about anyway, this approach is also highly unproductive and seldom results in remarkable work.
It is unfair because a job can be considered done well or poorly, only comparatively to a specific standard. By not taking the time to set and communicate the standard, any creative solution could be both the best and the worst at the same time. This discourages critical thinking and makes it hard to recognize a good idea even if it were to slap you in the face. Thoughtful solutions require leveraging our ideas, skills, experience, and expertise, which coincidentally are the qualities that make us human, while the spaghetti throwing approach tries to make machines of people. People treated as machines tend to be unhappy, unmotivated, and unproductive, which is not a suitable substrate for the novel and purposeful ideas you’re hoping for.
Branding is an exercise in creative problem-solving, and as such, it requires defining the problem to solve in the first place. There are well-defined problems, such as sudokus or crossword puzzles, and problems that are ill-defined to various degrees. A well-defined problem provides no space for creativity because it contains the correct answer. An extremely ill-defined problem instead overwhelms our limited primate brain, paralyzes us, and tempts us with the easy way out.
Creativity can only thrive in the sweet spot between freedom and constraints. For example, making the world a better place is an extremely ill-defined problem. Though everybody could do something about it, most people are confused and overwhelmed by it, and that’s why so few engage with it in meaningful ways. How are we going to make the world a better place? What’s already being done? Who will benefit? This last is particularly important. You’ll agree that a better world for SUV drivers is a lot different from a better world for polar bears, for example. Let’s keep going—Who should take action? And what kind of actions are we talking about?
Night club promoter Scott Harrison emerged from an existential crisis one day determined to make the world a better place. Having no idea where to start, he applied for random volunteering opportunities until he found himself on a ship heading to Liberia. There, he saw that most people didn’t have access to clean water. Women and girls were usually responsible and spent hours every day traveling miles on end and risking their lives to fetch bacteria-infested water from polluted rivers and lakes. He discovered that nearly one in ten people worldwide doesn’t have access to clean water and that more people die from drinking dirty water each year than from all forms of violence, including war.
Determined to do something about it, Scott returned to New York and did what he knew best as a nightclub promoter. He threw a party. Seven hundred people paid $20 to participate. The money was used to fix three existing wells and build three new wells in a refugee camp in northern Uganda. Nonprofit organization charity:water was born. Today charity:water brings clean water to almost 19 million people in need.
Scott Harrison’s story started with a lofty goal, and his journey progressively revealed the path to meaningful action one constraint at a time. First, he discovered a specific issue that interested him. He then used his particular set of skills to leverage his network to make a difference. It’s a great example of how broad aspirations are great springboards to action, but effective solutions can only come from a narrow enough focus.
I hope the fact that the charity:water example has nothing to do with branding didn’t confuse you. Massimo Vignelli, designer of the iconic 1972 New York subway map, used to say that design is one. He believed that whether you’re designing a chair, a building, a business, or a brand, your approach should essentially be the same. In his Canon he writes, “It is important to understand the starting point and all assumptions of any project to fully comprehend the final result and measure its efficiency. Clarity of intent will translate into clarity of result and that is of paramount importance in Design.”
In the past decade, I have no doubt become a better designer, technically speaking, but soon I’ve come to realize that my success as a creative depends a great deal on the relationships I have with my clients and the quality of the projects I join. Thus, a lot of my focus has been, and still is, on developing ways to help my clients find that clarity of intent, in the sweet spot between freedom and constraints, that would boost creativity, improve our chances of success, keep teams aligned and provide us with more sophisticated tools, beyond our personal taste, to recognize good creative solutions.
In other words, I learned how to help my clients craft great creative briefs that save time, money, headaches, and heartaches. How hard can it be? You probably wrote a couple yourself in the past. Well, I hate to have to break it to you, but there’s a good chance they were terrible. 80% of marketers—people who do this for a living—believe they’re pretty good at writing briefs, yet only 10% of the agencies that have to work with those briefs agree.
The takeaway is you will not know it when you see it unless you and your team are prepared and aligned. I’ll show you how to get there.