Return on Insights.
Return on Investment.
Return on Imagination.
All three are critical to excel in todays marketplace. If you are a creative leader and in charge of growth and experience – this model of thinking will deliver you results time and time again. This approach is something that is tactical enough for a team to rally around.
At a macro level – this framework gives you context and structure in how to approach any assignment or project, regardless of the status of it. The mindset is flexible in that regard.
Example:
- If you already have the insights, move onto how you can use your imagination to activate on those insights.
- If you need to collect insights – how will you do that?
Each macro level I has facets that help each section take shape.
Insights is the easiest – in the example above – we need to collect insights. Insights broadly have 2 facets – Quantitative and Qualitative – and come from various sources such as, First Party or Third Party. We can do that by conducting our own research in the form of polls, focus groups or user testing or by analyzing our existing customer base.
Imagination has the most facets and require lots of business analysis skills and creative ideation skills. The import part of the imagination stage is that there are no bad ideas in the beginning of this as long as you can tie it back to an insight. Where imagination often gets hung up is that teams try and figure out the “how” part of the idea vs. nurturing the collective group of ideas being generated. Imagination can be anything from a sports marketing sponsorship with a Major League baseball team to a merchandising program to drive incremental revenue.
Investment is also broken down into facets – how much will this cost us or how much will this make us. (For non-profit marketing campaigns or non transactional campaigns – this can also be viewed as Impact)
I have created several variations of digital media models that look at Cost Per Acquisition, total market size and other ways to view impact and benchmarking that can help round out this strategic way of thinking.
Have a chat about insights, see how you can learn from those insights and apply some imagination to them, then decide what that investment will be into execution.
ROI cubed – a framework to drive innovative thinking.
