Follow the yellow brick road

Over Thanksgiving I watched The Wizard of Oz on TV, commercial breaks and all, in vintage form. I loved it as much as ever and the scenes in the Land of Oz reminded me of an experience I’d had a little while back.

A couple years ago I had the pleasure of working on a unique project. The client was a technology company looking to disrupt fashion supply chain. Everyone on their leadership team was younger than me and they had just raised hundreds of millions of VC dollars. I wasn’t jealous or anything though.

They’d come to us for a few things, positioning among them. They had a clear sense of the world they wanted to create but hadn’t quite articulated it in a way that was easy to understand, much less get on board with.

We had a plan.

First, because it was B2B we’d need to tap some different research resources that normal consumer panels. We’d speak to industry leaders and people with boots on the ground in the fashion world.

Second, we sent them a list of about 25 questions that were key to understanding how they thought about their business. (I’ve included a similar list here for anyone who wants to use them as a starting point.)

A week or so later they sent us back a deck with detailed answers to each of the questions. If you’re a client, do this, it was so helpful.

But then.

A few weeks later we presented the positioning deck and the head of marketing replied with, “This is all great, but, you know, we wrote all of this.” I was kind of rattled because he wasn’t totally wrong — the deck was full of facts about his brand. The impostor in me was exposed.

With the benefit of hindsight and some more experience, I’ve come to embrace that kind of reaction as a sign we’re tapping into something they wanted to express but couldn’t. Asking the right questions was critical to getting them to open up. Filtering the responses into a story, one they found actionable enough to turn into their tagline, indicated we were breaking some ground. (I’d argue that the additional research we did was pretty helpful in establishing cultural and competitive context but…)

Most of us are too close to the giant swirl of facts that make up our lives to be able to tell coherent stories with them. Many brand leaders are the same.

A therapist doesn’t give you advice; they ask you questions that help you arrive at the answer yourself. The Wizard of Oz reminds us that the power is always inside us, provided we allow ourselves to access it.

Even if that means that someone else needs to remind us of that fact.