#9 How to walk for inspiration
and to be strategist for women entrepreneurs.
Hi,
This is Room To Fail, a newsletter about learning how to become a strategist right beside me, a junior-strat that is constantly (and fearfully) looking for things to do wrong & fail at, just to only get them right the next time. Or the next.
I’m Irina. Welcome and buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Hopefully.
If you got this from a friend or randomly found it online, you can choose to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.
These read takes you about 11 minutes.
🧠⚡︎BRAIN FAILURE
I love when I encounter professionals that use their knowledge to pay it forward and especially to a group of people they represent.
Dana Lupsa has been a Ph.D. lecturer at Transilvania University of Brasov for the last 18 years, a brand strategist and communicator for the last 4 and president of Happy Moms, an NGO that supports women entrepreneurs or future women entrepreneurs and also creates financial education programs for children. But besides these 3 professional roles she fulfils, the one she’s most in love with is being a mother and a wife. Which I think brings a gentle touch and also lots of strength to all the others.
I wanted to understand how a women-brands strategist works so I asked her some questions. Inspiration - play!
What’s your work process? What do you need to get started?
My process always starts with a questionnaire for me to find out what are short-term and long term objectives of my client, what was done by now in terms of communication, what actions were efficient or not in terms of objectives, but also what are the values, the mission, vision, messages, tone of voice, brand personality, brand calling card and main/preferred communication channels.
What’s your go to thing for inspiration when you feel frozen?
I close absolutely everything and go for a walk while listening to music. If that does not work, I paint a lot. I had a few situations in which I insisted on researching the subject further and that was a disaster, so I learned to step outside, literally, and it works for me very well. Actually, sometimes I do research at the end of the process, even though I strongly do not recommend it, and I do it because I feel very inspired and assume that that campaign was not done before. Most of the time I am right.
When do you feel most nervous? When do you feel most comfortable?
I would say I feel overwhelmed with emotions, not nervous, and those moments are related to the first meeting with the client, because it means a lot to me to feel connected to her – I only work with women -, to understand her as a woman and to develop a closer relationship with her. If that kind of relationship does not work, I prefer to recommend one of my other colleagues, since I am interested in solving her problem one way or another. I feel most comfortable when I deliver the strategy or the campaign because I am sure that it will contribute to the objectives of the client and I can even visualise the results.
Can you tell me the story of a fail that changed you? How did it change you?
That happened one time, when I created and tried to implement a PR campaign and also a communication policy with customers. And when I say I tried, it is because I was supposed to work with a marketing specialist and the employees of my client. It was my only failure and the reasons were plenty – staring from the fact that I was not able to blend in and become, even for a while, a member of the team, I was not able to understand the reasons for delaying some actions by the marketing specialist, and not being able to transform the team into some enthusiastic persons. I was actually supposed to be more than a strategist and more like a manager, even though I was not supposed to do all the attributes of that job, as a manager. I was somewhere in between, not so clear, even for me. It changed the way I work and the entire process. Starting from then, I make very clear my role, even from the beginning, and I deliver the strategy or the plan for the campaign, afterwards either I assist the team of my client to implement it or I entirely implement it by myself. No mixture.
What is your personal definition of strategy?
According to all the books – and I just love books, considering my proclivity on education for about 24 years now – the strategy is considered a plan for the long term (5 to 10 years), and if we speak about communication strategy, it has to be derived from the company’s strategy. Considering this time of change, the development of technology and its influence on communication, I would say that 3 years is a more appropriate horizon of time and the key words should be flexibility and adjusting day by day.
What do you know about your work and wished you knew in your first year? Or just a piece of advice for junior strats.
I wish I knew that most of the time communication means planning, organising, processes and rules, even though we talk about a very creative domain. I wish I would have had some documents as models to develop a strategy and a plan, so my advice for juniors would be either to work first for an agency or for a freelancer to learn about the processes because they save time and, in the end, money.
Short break for some cheesy but soulful rant: I’m really grateful that Rob, Edith and Dana took their time to answer my questions. I’m really grateful that this is my number 9 newsletter and, besides the weekly motivation to learn, I also get to talk to some amazing people.
That’s it. Thank you.
Ok now, don’t go for that walk yet. We have 3 more things to talk about.
🤯 “HOW DID THEY THINK ABOUT THAT?!” SECTION
Spiralling into some Julian Cole decks these days. So here are 3 I love and I return to at times:
This strategy starter pack.
The art of questioning clients.
Giving creative feedback.
🍴INTERESTING TOOLS TO GET WRONG
When I started learning strategy, I thought I had to fill out this brief format with info and then send it to the creative folks. Some 1 and a half years later, I can count the briefs I wrote on one hand. That’s not because lack of work, but because writing a good brief is all about separating the main components and write these really well.
So I decided to go into writing a good brief these next newsletters.
Which are the components of a good brief? I think it depends on the creatives you’re working with. I used to be a more strategic-oriented copywriter that needed lots of info before going into the “creative work”. Other prefer a lot less information, but with key words to dance around.
But what I believe all briefs need to touch are these points: the problem, the target, the product or communication leverage (differentiation vs. distinctiveness to be used here), the insight, the strategic idea and sometimes the deliverables.
And today I’ll start with defining the problem and writing it as a statement.
Mark Pollard defines it as “the human problem behind the business problem”.
Julian Cole & Charlie Quirk explain the difference between a good and a bad problem statement with a movie scene. They also add a great check list to see if you identified a real & juicy problem. It should be: externally focused, clear, evocative and meaningful.
I, on the other hand, use the problem statement also to test my clients. I mean the word “problem”. Most of my clients “don’t have problems”. They just want to sell more.
Most of them only have “opportunities”. So it gets really tough to find anything out about what’s going on inside or outside the company & state anything as a problem. So as though as it is to state a good problem, everything gets even harder as you cannot say the P-word.
Yeah, Irina, stating a problem is hard. We get it!
Good. When I understood this, it made me change the way I spend my time between problem & solution. It got from 20-80 to 80-20. And that is because if you state the right problem, it opens up lots of solutions.
So what I would add to the check-list is this: find a problem that expands your solutions horizon. Also, it should be written from the people’s point of view, not the business.
* After writing all of the above, I read yesterday’s Salmon Theory. Check it out for another point about the brevity needed in defining the problem.
📚 THE STRATEGY BOOK CLUB
(How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up, Les Binet and Sarah Carter -
COMPLETED: Y/N, page 129)
Chapter four covers research and analysis - where to use research and what sort of research is best, qual and quant research, how to compare the good numbers and how not to abuse them. Wonderfully practical read.
I can’t tell you to buy this book enough. I have to restrain myself from copying all of it because everything seems like a key point.
That said, some key-of-the-key points:
Don’t just listen to what people say. Pay attention to how they say it and what they don’t say. Look out for “the dogs that don’t bark in the night”. Good researchers know this. Clients don’t.
“Positive” responses aren’t always good. Watch out for the polite, the similar and the inoffensive. Don’t be too afraid of polarised, or even “negative”, responses. They’re a sign of energy. This is what you’re looking for when researching creative work.
Sometimes used as evidence that communications drives sales, in fact causality usually runs the other way: buying brand X makes you more likely to notice its communications. (the so-called Rosser Reeves effect - named after a famous adman in the 50s)
I think being skeptical about data is a fair conclusion. Always put numbers in context. Keep in mind that we all lie sometimes. Or we don’t want to share the whole truth.
But not here - ‘cause we have room to fail and be vulnerable - only to become better,
i.