The document discusses the importance of setting good problems and developing core thoughts for creative work. It provides examples of both good and bad problems, and outlines characteristics of effective problems. These include being understandable, solvable, and inspiring new thinking. The document also discusses tools for analyzing problems such as issue trees. Finally, it discusses how to develop core thoughts, emphasizing that they should be simple, stimulative, and interesting. The core thought aims to communicate the key idea in a compelling way.

1. Good problems and
Core thoughts
paul mcenany // heehawmarketing.com

2. Setting Good Problems

3. If you pose the same challenge, use similar kinds of
input as others have used and place similarly
functioned people from similar backgrounds who all
happen to work in advertising and say go figure this
out, can we honestly expect a different result than the
last agency provided? Or any agency could provide?

4. “If we’re not feeding the creative process with well
thought through, imaginatively framed problems, then
we’re failing creativity.”
- Martin Weigel, Wieden and Kennedy

5. Why we need good problems
They show us things that stand in our way. And great
problems, great challenges, are most able to generate
inspired solutions.
Setting the right challenge gives our work specific,
solvable, knowable and achievable purpose. When done
right, they show us the most commercially viable path to
an end.

6. What is a good problem?
Client Challenge
“We want to be happier.”
Meet the Johannsons. They came to us
with a challenge. They wanted to be
happier.
So as per usual, they came up to the
office so we could have a chat about their
problem. It was then that we met little
Jackson. He was a crier. Non-stop. The
whole interview. They spoke of a time 2
years go when they were super happy.
Just married. Going out all the time, but
still got great sleep. They were newlyweds
in love.
They just want to be that happy again.

7. They have a baby problem.
The answer became clear to us quickly. They
have a baby problem. So we briefed the
creative team. The objective, the Johannsons
want to be happy. Like back before they had
little Jackson. The team came back with a few
options. They were all great. Dead on brief.
We were super excited to show the client. We
brought the Johannsons in, did some glad
handing and whatnot. Then it was time to
reveal our concepts.

8. “Grandma”
The first concept we called Grandma. The
kid would be shipped off to Southern
California to live with grandma. A simple,
but effective concept.
They did not look pleased.

9. “Adoption”
We pressed on to the next concept. This
one we really thought would sell, so we
took our time with the set up, explaining
our thought process. We called it
“Adoption.” No dice. The Johannsons sat
back further in their chairs. Never fear, our
favorite concept was still to come.

10. “The Pillow Case”
And that’s about the time they got up and
walked out.

11. WTF

12. What is a good problem?
The Real Problem
Of course, if we had just gone to their house,
we would have found a small studio
apartment that they hadn’t yet escaped. As
much as they loved that little kiddo, he kept
them up all night and they had nowhere to
find quiet. They didn’t have a baby
problem, they had a space problem. They
could have just moved a little further outside
of town to bigger place they could afford, or
we could have created some solutions for the
home or helped them up their networking
skills to get better jobs.
But now we’ve lost a client. And almost a
baby. That’s why problems are important.
Problems are foundations.

13. What makes a good problem?
• It is understandable without much explanation
• It is solvable and measurable
• It inspires new thinking
• It provides a differentiating, brand-aligned territory
• It provides focus on the tasks that matter most

14. What a problem is not
We need to sell more stuff.
Everyone wants to sell more stuff or they wouldn’t be
talking to us. Our job is ultimately to increase sales.
Doesn’t matter if we’re optimizing CRM for a direct
marketing client or creating a campaign to enhance the
image for a brand client – we’re here to add value. Good
problems go beyond the obvious.

15. Where we find good problems
We tend to look in the same types of areas for where
problems may exist. It’s a process that mixes art, science,
gut and experience – narrowing where to look and looking
for incongruences. When something doesn’t make sense,
we stop and understand why.
Brand
Audience
Market
Category
&
&
&
&
Product
Behaviors
Environment
Competition

16. Brand & Product
• What do people say or think about your brand? Is this
perception the same as you would expect?
• Do they tell others about it?
• Is your in-store experience aligned with what you communicate?
• Is the internal organization aligned in support?
• Are there other points when the brand seems confused?
• Is your product being used in ways you wouldn’t expect?
• Are there time when usage unexpectedly drops off or increases?

17. When tasked with updating the Honda brand, W+K didn’t have to
search long before finding a disconnect between public
perception and the actual culture of Honda. While most people
considered Honda a safe bet and certainly high quality, they were
also bored by it. They found the car dull.
But within the walls of Honda, they found a feisty, inventive
company “still behaving as though their unpredictable
engineering genius of a founder was stalking the corridors looking
for engines to tweak.”

18. The challenge became reconnecting those two worlds.
http://bit.ly/hondacogs

19. Audience & Behaviors
• What is it that we want the audience to do? Now why aren’t they
doing that?
• What are there motivations for buying, both rationally and
emotionally?
• What is it that our audience wants to do that they can’t?
• Who are the heavy users? Are purchases grouped heavily within
certain audiences? What makes them different from other
audiences? Are there also commonalities?
• How about light users? Why don’t they buy more or more
frequently?
• Is the audience for your product changing?
• Is there additional value we can create for current audiences that
aligns with the brand purpose?

20. Nike saw an opportunity in an audience that already had
high recognition and regard for the brand, but below
average product penetration. High school footballers
thought of Nike when playing basketball or running, just
not as much in football.
When they dug into that audience they found a competitive
bunch, dreaming of what it might be like to play in the NFL.
They tracked their own stats and posted videos of
themselves to YouTube.

21. Nike realized that they can extend their existing value
within this new audience. They created the Head2Head
platform which enabled a behavior that high school
athletes were already engaged in, but without the proper
tools to do it easily.
http://bit.ly/nikeh2h

22. Market & Environment
• Are major purchasing shifts happening? Is it stagnant?
• What else might gain the attention of our audience?
• What other products might the audience group with our brand?
Are they trending in the same way we are?
• Is there a movement or an uprising that is relevant to the brand in
some way?
• What cultural elements are popular in this market? Does that
align with the brand?
• Where are environments where the product or service is bought
most often? How about used most often? Are there factors
within that environment that influence behavior?

23. Tesco found an opportunity in the way that many South
Korean professionals shop for groceries. It becomes an
extra unwanted shopping trip on the way home from work.

24. Instead of adding promotions to entice people to the store,
they found a time when their audience actually might enjoy
a quick shop, and brought the store experience to them.
http://bit.ly/tescosubstore

25. Category & Competition
• Who are the major competitors? What are their strengths and
weaknesses? Who is growing the fastest? Why?
• Is there an orthodoxy that exists within the category? What
assumptions are those based on? Are those still valid?
• How is the competition selling themselves?
• Why does that audience buy from someone else rather than us?
• Are competitors investing in places we are not? Why would they
do that?

26. MTV launched in the early 80’s as an anti-establishment, grouchy
underdog totally focused on a new form of television built around
the music video. But after 20 plus years, they weren’t playing much
music anymore. They were the behemoth, giving more time to the
Real World, Sorority Life and Room Raiders than underground
music. They spotlighted the fantasy life of the young and rich
instead of the “we don’t give a shit” attitude that defined the
network from day one through Nirvana and Beavis and Butthead
when they led the slacker rebellion.

27. But those kids still existed, and it’s there where Fuse found a
problem they could solve.
http://bit.ly/fusebeachhouse

28. Tools for Problem Solving
Issue Tree
These are perhaps the most fundamental tools in
understanding problems. The Issue tree is a diagram that
breaks down a challenge or problem into smaller pieces in
order to understand the relationships between those
chunks.
There are two types, often used one after the other, the
why and the how issue tree.

29. Tools for Problem Solving
Basic Issue Tree
Increase
Sales
Component
Increase
Profit
Reduce
What do you want to do?
Product
Cost
Component

30. Tools for Problem Solving
Why Issue Tree – Diagnosing problems
Used first, the why issue tree begins to outline the
problem. It’s best to start with the client ask and some
initial work to understand their audience, brand and
market. Annual reports are a great place to start for this.

31. Tools for Problem Solving
Why Issue Tree
Why?
Millennials are
finding other
ways to give.
Under 30
charitable
giving is
decreasing
Unemploy-
What is the problem?
ment for
Under 30
increasing

32. Tools for Problem Solving
How Issue Tree – Working to solutions
The how issue tree becomes most effective after you’ve
determined the most impactful problem you can solve
given your resources. The How issue tree starts with the
question and moves towards solutions.

33. Tools for Problem Solving
How Issue Tree
How?
Increase
How?
advertising
Increase u30
customer
base
How can we Add
increase younger
investments consultants
for those under
30?
Increase u30
What is the challenge?
customer
investments

34. Other tools
Ishikawa Trees (also called a fishbone diagram)
Useful for looking at a complete problem

35. Other tools
catwoe
A framework for understanding the parts of the problem.
C = Customers
A = Actors
T = Transformation process
W = World View
O = Owner
E = Environmental constraints

36. Framing Problems
• Finding the right problem is not enough. The more
imaginatively or interestingly you can describe a
challenge while retaining simplicity and specificity, the
more imaginative and inspired the solutions you’ll find.
• When possible, flip the negative to the positive.

37. Framing Problems
Running applications are only for runners.
Make running fun for people who think running sucks,
but do it anyway.

38. The Core Thought

39. Core thought
The core thought is the main idea you want to
communicate with your campaign.

40. Core thought
Where is your audience now?
Where do they need to be for us to be commercially viable?
What do they need to know about us to get there?
Is this place ownable, compelling and distinct?
And there you have it - you have the beginnings of a core thought.

41. Saying things versus
Communicating things

42. About 95% if human communication is non-verbal. Body
language, appearance, facial expressions, these are what
people react to and subconsciously remember. It's no
different with creative work. The core message that arises
from the proposition still matters, but it's the delivery that
really matters - the brand's body language.
- Andrew Hovell

43. Say, Do and Be.
The Pharma Challenge
You are a company in a less than trusted industry, but
you have a pretty good track record.
So you want to communicate that you are trustworthy.
You wouldn’t say trust me. You would do something
that communicated that you are trusted.

44. • You might show other people who trust you.
• Or you might make a guarantee.
• Or you might issue a report on your effectiveness
• You may make your business practices more transparent.
All of these things would communicate that they can be
trusted, before they’ve said a word.

45. The Brand Idea versus
the Proposition

46. Brand ideas usually find a place that’s true to what the
brand represents or believes in, then matches that to
something that’s meaningful or interesting to their
audience. That’s essentially the value you create. It’s
your vision, values and how you see the world. This
doesn’t change much at all when done properly. And
everything else you do should fit within that.

47. The proposition is another type of core idea, sometimes
known as the key message, selling idea or
communications idea. This is what a specific campaign,
ad, website, whatever, is meant to communicate. It has to
be aligned with the brand idea – but it’s meant to solve a
more specific, often short-term, challenge.

48. Project X
Red Bull
Music
Academy
Red Bull
Creation
Gives
you
wings
Culture
Blogs
Crashed Art of the
ice Flight
Communications Ideas
Red Bull revitalizes body and mind.
Brand Idea

49. Simple, Stimulative and
Interesting

50. Simple
Although our final communication should be deep and
complex, we need to start from a place that can be
understood by lots of different people, both internally and
externally.
Red Bull has Taurine, which increases physical
endurance and mental alertness.
Red Bull revitalizes body and mind.

51. Stimulative
Always consider where the ideas can go. Whether you’re
writing, reading or distributing briefing documents, the
core thought should feel bigger than the statement. In
other words, as you write it, if you can’t think of any ideas
of where it could go beyond a headline, it’s probably not
right.
We make the best
Welcome to
hammers, now $10
Contestville.
off at Costco.

52. Interesting
The awesomeness of a core thought done well is that it’s
impactful, compelling, arresting, exciting. People want to
work on it. It makes someone look at something familiar in
a different way. That’s the core thought at its very best.
Old Spice has a great, musky scent.
Men should smell like men.

53. Interestingness
Fluff

54. Core thought
So that’s the core thought.
• Think about what you say and what you communicate
as two different things.
• Be sure you understand the challenge – focus on the
brand alone or solving a specific problem.
• Start in a place that is simple, stimulative and interesting
for the team and credible and distinctive for the brand.