How we think
Most research tells you
what people say.
We are after what they do, and will not admit.
Two disciplines, joined. We hunt for the truth, then we find the tension inside it. One without the other is decoration.
Ask a person why
they bought something.
They will give you a reason. It will not be the reason.
Not because they are lying. Because the decision was made somewhere they cannot see, and the reason was assembled afterwards, to be presentable.
Which means the brief you are handed, the one that says customers want a lower price, is usually an accurate record of a rationalisation. It is a very expensive place to start.
So we go looking for what sits underneath: the behaviour that contradicts the stated preference, the small humiliation nobody mentions, the status question hiding inside a functional one.
Part one · Truth hunting
Five places
to look.
We work through five lenses, every time. The one that cracks the problem is rarely the one the brief points at.
01
Culture
The macro forces shaping how people think, feel and behave. The currents your brand has to swim in whether or not it acknowledges them.
What has shifted that nobody has named yet?
02
Category
The conventions, the tells, the rules everybody follows without remembering why. And the space nobody has taken because taking it feels rude.
What does everyone here do, that none of them needs to?
03
Company
The distinctive DNA. Not the values on the wall, but the thing the business actually does well enough to be worth defending.
What can only you say, and mean it?
04
Consumer
Attitudes, beliefs, motivations. Specifically the ones people would rather not put on a form.
What are they actually afraid of here?
05
Connections
Where, when and how we earn our way in. Media as behaviour, not placement. The radio in the matatu, not the reach figure.
Where is this person when they are open to anything?
The five-lens discipline comes out of the Truth 2 Meaning tradition we were trained in at McCann. We did not invent it and we do not claim it. What we did was join it to the half that most planning leaves out.
Part two · The half that moves people
Tension gets attention.
A truth on its own is just information. Nobody has ever changed their behaviour because they were correctly informed.
What a tension is
Two things a person believes at once that cannot both be satisfied. The immediate thought and the future consequence, pulling in opposite directions.
The cheapest way to move is rarely the cheapest way to keep moving.
Everybody involved in this marriage believes they are doing the right thing.
Nobody refuses a tablet. They refuse to become the person they think the tablet makes them.
Each of those is a truth with a fault line running through it. That fault line is where the work goes.
Why the two halves need each other
Truth without tension produces work that is accurate and forgettable. It is the campaign that describes the product correctly and changes nothing.
Tension without truth produces work that is provocative and hollow. It is the stunt everybody talks about for a week, attached to a brand nobody can name.
Joined, they produce the only useful thing: a piece of communication a person cannot fully resolve, and therefore cannot fully put down.
How it runs
Hunt. Build.
Learn out loud.
-
01
Truth hunting
Immersion, desk work, and enough time in the actual place that we stop being surprised by it. It ends when we can state the tension in one sentence that makes the client uncomfortable.
-
02
Briefing and journeying
We rewrite the brief, out loud, with you in the room. Then we map the ecosystem between your brand and the person, every moment where the relationship is actually decided.
-
03
Concept, launch and measure
Ideas built on the tension and tested against reality. Then delivery, monitoring and refinement, because the first version is a hypothesis rather than a monument.
The journey we plan against
Six moments.
Not one funnel.
A funnel assumes people move in one direction and never talk to each other. They do both, constantly.
Spark
Drive awareness and consideration with an actual point of view.
Seed
Generate energy and cultural relevance where the conversation already is.
Search
Give people the content and tools to evaluate you confidently.
Shop
Remove the friction between wanting it and having it.
Share
Turn use into advocacy, which is the only media nobody can buy.
Savour
Improve the experience after the sale, so loyalty is earned rather than assumed.
There is a version of this business that is about being clever, and a version that is about being right. They look identical in the room, and completely different a year later.
A powerful truth sets creativity free.Once you actually know why somebody behaves the way they do, and where that behaviour contradicts itself, the work more or less writes itself. And it keeps working, because it was never being held up by the budget.
Find the tension and the idea is cheap. Skip it and no amount of money will save the campaign.