We ran a Discovery Deck workshop for Ian Miles of Schawk. He was looking for a video to help support his marketing plan for their Digital Product Visualisation tool. This is a sophisticated tool that can create photo-realistic images of products from CAD drawings or photos taken of prototypes. Where the meeting was about the script, it turned more into a marketing strategy workshop.
We set the ground work by asking Ian how he wanted his clients to feel after watching the video, or being exposed to the marketing. Excited, intrigued, convinced. We asked how he wanted to feel once he’d played it. This was more interesting. Relieved. Excited. Proud. Now we had something to live up to!
Marketing Strategy Workshop
We then began the first stage of the workshop, where we are laying out all the ideas behind the project. Our approach is to ask lots of questions to tease out all the different elements to the project and get them on the table. Here’s what he thought of the process:
Part one of the workshop set the scene. Not ‘what is the subject matter’ but more the psychology, from both the selling and buying points of view. Easy to jot down but invigorating as the Discovery Deck team got to grips with what it really meant. Their ability to listen, comprehend, evaluate and challenge was enviable.
Next we started testing Ian’s assumptions of his market. When Ian saw his product from his buyer’s point of view, it enabled him to prioritise what they were interested in learning about, rather than the features that excited him.
Part two took us back to the drawing board. Those pre-conceived concepts were long gone. With our challenge now presented in a new light, some deep thinking followed; propose, challenge, justify, amend / proceed. With Napoleon’s objective independent view, there were no short cuts to take here. But, in relatively quick time a new storyboard was born. One that bore little resemblance to draft one, yet made perfect sense; justifiable sense, not just within the setting of the discovery workshop but later to my peers too.
We were able to come up with a script outline which focused on what the clients found most important, and these were the features Napoleon Creative focused on while making the film.
What we love about our Discovery Deck process is that it really changes our client’s viewpoint on their project. Whether it’s used as a marketing strategy workshop or a planning meeting exercises, it lets them see their organisation from the outside in. Ian summed up this journey quite well!
What a revealing process! For a subject matter I knew inside out and with pre-conceived concepts and storytelling strategies in place ready to roll-out, a couple of hours’ evaluation not only sent the baby out with the bathwater, but the bath tub too!
