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It is per­haps stag­ger­ingly unsur­pris­ing that most mar­keters and their agen­cies spend most of their time in search of solu­tions for their brands.

After all, we all want to get to the right answer as soon as humanly pos­si­ble (if not sooner). It also pro­vides the sat­is­fac­tion of actu­ally doing (and be seen to be doing) some­thing, any­thing – quick, unleash the mar­ket­ing nin­jas (if only there really were mar­ket­ing ninjas).

The trou­ble is – this is kind of dumb.

It’s far bet­ter to spend qual­ity time (as much as you can spare) really under­stand­ing what the prob­lem is. The real prob­lem, not just the one you think it is. The strange thing is when you do, quite often the real prob­lem is quite dif­fer­ent than the one you thought it was.

Your motto in this should be the Bud­dhist mantra:

Don’t just do some­thing, sit there

Now let me pause for a moment to make one thing absolutely clear: I’m not say­ing we should all sit around inspect­ing our navels while the mar­ket goes whistling past. Speed is still of the essence. For­tune favours the agile. And analy­sis paral­y­sis won’t get you anywhere.

But… if I had just just an hour to come up with a solu­tion, I’d pre­fer to spend 40 min­utes of it get­ting to the bot­tom of the real prob­lem (and prob­a­bly another 10 min­utes redefin­ing it) than to have a whole hour with a pad and a marker.

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