If we in adland only ever see ad-shaped problems, we’ll only create ad-shaped solutions. But if we see people, all manner of new and exciting stuff starts to happen.  As ever in marketing, progress lies in asking better questions and more imaginatively examining the lives, habits, needs, wants, desires, frustrations and dissatisfactions in people’s lives.

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If we can only grasp the necessity of beginning our thinking with real consumer issues and needs, rather than what type of creative product (social, viral, advertising, content, POS, etc., etc.) we will make, or what line of fashionable rhetoric we will subscribe to, then we might stand a better chance of unleashing the true potential of our collective creativity.

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How can we look beyond what advertising can solve?

How exactly do we expand the scope and value of creativity?

How can we identify opportunities for growth?

How can marketing properly shape itself around the consumer?

How can marketing define itself by what it solves, rather than by what it makes?

How can product development and marketing be reunited once more?

In all of this, theory and rhetoric will not help us. We need something more practical.

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Stephen King’s Consumer Buying System

http://martinweigel.org/2013/09/16/hacking-the-business-with-stephen-king/

// Love it when someone outside the ‘formal’ discipline of Experience Design can so clearly articulate huge landscapes of our work.