Diving headlong into the unknown and deciding to stick with your choice for the long term sounds scary. It doesn’t need to be, though. If we break down long term planning into a succession of small, sensible choices we engineer out risk by having smaller spaces to reverse out from.

As Desmond Tutu famously said, “there is only one way to eat an elephant; a bite at a time”.

(Pedants of the world unite, this is true for all food).

The point here is, if we have an idea of the big goal it makes all of our other choices much more straightforward. It also means that we can experiment and take sensible, calculated risk, as we know what the overarching desired outcome is.

If you’re bothering to read this, there’s a good chance that you’re interested enough in your own brand’s positioning and growth strategies to have the big, exciting points of the future already mapped out, but what about the steps that help deliver you to marketing Nirvana?

While we’re big fans of the big picture and love starting our engagements at a proposition/brand level (we’re award winning, dontchaknow), we’re also a team with a broad range of skills that come together to deliver impact.

With that in mind, and in the spirit of taking things one step at a time, I asked some of the senior figures around our business one simple question, which threw up some interesting answers:

If you could convince B2B marketers to try one new thing in 2023, what would it be and why?

Here’s what Tom Vardy, Creative Director, said:

It might be an odd thing for a creative to say, but invest in research at the start of a significant project. For all parties involved there’s no such thing as too much information, and a better-informed brief always makes for better creative work.

We’re always conscious of what the ultimate result for the work might be, whether it’s a campaign, brand activation project or any other piece. If we can place these results into a wider context that tells us what your customers and prospects think and feel, what your competitors do and how you’re different, we’ll deliver exciting creative work that has impact.

Proper research also helps the guys in our other teams set up tracking and conversions, giving us all solid data to review and learn from so we can improve as we go.

As a final, added benefit, it can help take the process of reviewing creative work away from the realms of personal opinion as we review everything through the prism of the brand and the findings. Its perhaps why the BBC invests £50m a year into understanding its audiences.

If you’re interested, there’s a great Marketing Week piece that suggests if you don’t invest at least 5% of your budget into research then you don’t know what you’re doing… https://mba.marketingweek.com/if-you-dont-invest-5-of-your-budget-in-research-you-dont-know-what-youre-doing/

So, there you have it. A creative asking for more research, who’d have thought it?