Essay
Beware of the Box
Anyone in the creative industry knows and loves to receive this brief and most clients likes to provide it. Yet despite all the joy and good intentions, visit this three weeks later both parties end up frustrated and puzzled with why the other part don’t get them.
I am of course talking about the famous ‘Think outside the box’ brief.
The brief that is litterally like giving a child the keys to a candy store. So many ideas have been roaming inside the creatives head and is just wating to be unleashed on the unsuspicious customer. After all we are creatives and our clients pay us to think outside the box. That is what we are good at.
It is probably fair to say that around 3/4 of the times it goes horribly wrong. The client don’t understand what the agency have come up with and the agency is frustrated that client is now backpedaling and don’t want to play with boxes any more. So what goes wrong?
The answer is very simple I think. When the client asks an agency to think outside the box, most agencies start doing exactly that. They think outside their own box in order to really push the envelop and provide something new and exiting for their client. But there in lies the problem – What the clients is really asking is for the agency to think outside the clients box, not the box of the creatives in the agency.
It pays to understand this trap and make sure you learn how to think outside your clients box instead of your own.
(: simply beautiful…