Getting to get-to-buy
A few weeks ago my pals Mike and Andrew asked me to give a presentation to their undergrad advertising class at LMU’s M-School. The theme of the week was “insight to ideation” and I decided to talk through writing a Get-To-By.
Now more than a dozen years into this planning journey, I’ve used a bunch of different brief frameworks. I shared my own cobbled-together one a little while back. No framework is best. The good ones simply ask questions, put you in the spotlight, and ask you to begin entertaining a restless crowd.
I chose a GTB for the particular part of the journey these students were at. They’d spent a couple weeks doing research, defining and refining problems. They had a good idea what they wanted to solve and had some thoughts on how to solve it.
A GTB is sneaky. On its face it’s simplistic — a reason why I resisted it for some time.
Get (audience)
To (desired action)
By (strategic idea)
It gets more powerful when you dive it, like an engineering or operations problems where logical errors create obvious bugs. The pieces need each other for strength, support, and fluidity. It has a way of revealing incomplete understanding or imprecise thinking.
I’ve come to love the GWTB version (which history tells me is actually the original) to make clearer that we need a POV on the audience.
Get (communications target — demos help here and I don’t have them below)
Who (audience’s tension or unmet desire)
To (desired action)
By (action that resolves the tension)
Because the students had already started brainstorming, I nestled in a quick discussion from Good Strategy Bad Strategy to help organize some of their thoughts. To summarize Rummelt:
The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:
1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge.
2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge.
3. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy.
For the purposes of the discussion, I called these the Problem, Big Idea, and Little Ideas.
The Diagnosis/ Problem (which the students already had) feeds the Who and To. They’d need to come up with the Get, which is relatively simple, and the By, which is usually the hardest because it’s the least descriptive and the most like a leap into the unknown.
I shared a couple examples from campaigns I’ve worked on in past lives. (In the interest of clarity and protecting confidentiality: neither was the actual brief used because we used different frameworks at each agency.)
For Volkswagen, ahead of the 2018 Men’s World Cup. It was becoming clear that the U.S. wouldn’t even be in the tournament, and Volkswagen had committed to sponsoring the broadcast.
Get: American sports fans
Who: Only care about soccer when the U.S. is competing
To: Watch the 2018 Men’s World Cup
By: Getting Americans to root for another country with the same intensity and passion as their own
For Bomb Pop, the brand wanted to deepen its resonance with younger “ice pop”* lovers while also beginning to erode the larger habit of calling everything in the category by the name of a top competitor, Popsicle. (*Try to say it; it feels very weird.)
Get: Tweens and teens
Who: Know Bomb Pop by shape but not by name
To: See Bomb Pop as iconic
By: Showing up in their worlds like a pop culture creator
The students had never used the GWTB before and had about 15 minutes to write one as a group and present it live. I would’ve come up with every excuse possible to avoid being in their shoes, but they handled it with grace and skill, sharing sharp, coherent thoughts in a new language. (Credit goes to the students themselves and M-School leadership for their brilliant stewardship.)
We had some productive discussion about whether their their Tos were the behavior we really wanted to create. We talked about if their Bys were Big Ideas or Little Ideas. Were we resolving the audience’s unmet desires in the most interesting way? The line isn’t obvious; Little ideas can turn into Big Ideas when examined from new angles. Did we define our audience in the most actionable way? Were we trying to get them to do too much? They went off to their workshops to see what they could turn it all into.
