ThinkAbouts & Why Every Marketer Should Do Them

Over the weekend I was Twittering about a few topics and happened to mention a Zenned employee benefit we started last year called the ThinkAbout. In a nutshell, any Zehnder employee can spend an entire day just thinking about a subject. It could be a client issue, agency issue or a world issue like litter, global warming or how to help local students get a better education. The topic matters not, what matters is that the employee spends an entire day practicing "Deep Thought." The idea of deep thought is to overcome the "Depth Deficit" (Zaltman-Marketing Metaphoria) which is defined as a lack of careful reflection and bold thinking about rich consumer information. At the end of the day, the employee simply has to report back to the management team the output of their day of thinking.

I started this practice because I have for a long time thought that the biggest hurdle facing marketers today isn't technological change, DVR's, communication and information clutter -- though all certainly make our job harder -- no, the biggest challenge is we don't have time to really think about what we're doing. Exasperating the situation is that college kids today (or at least the majority of the ones I've interviewed of late) lack the basic critical thinking skills to really deep dive an issue to understand its core. Everyone wants to talk about tactics before they've even defined the real issue and a strategy(s) for solving that issue.

Thankfully, after reading Zaltman's Marketing Metaphoria over the Christmas holiday, I find I'm not alone in my thought. Seems Zaltman's company was hired by McCann Erickson Worldwide to do a study of CEO's and CMO's to determine what their biggest challenges are to achieving top-line growth.

#1 on their list was "a depth deficit within their companies." They spoke not only about the absence of careful, imaginative thinking, but also of the significant cost of it's absence. Man I couldn't agree more.

But, big thinking requires a concentrated, focused effort. Which is exactly why last year we instituted the ThinkAbout practice. Like any new practice, it's been a bit slow to catch on but there have been a few really cool results. The coolest by far has to be TypeNo+, the result of our Interactive Creative Director's ThinkAbout. He wanted to figure out how we as an agency could help preserve and promote the positive cultural things going on in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Check out what he came up with -- especially if you're planning a trip here. Great stuff.

I wish more folks had taken advantage of the ThinkAbout last year, but like the cobbler's children that have no shoes, ours was a busy little firm and in that environment, things like ThinkAbouts tend to get pushed to the back-burner...but then, that was the reason we invented them in the first place. I can only hope that this year, we all think more about the results of Zaltman's study and pay more attention to the cost of not thinking deeply.

What do you think?