Write Your Project’s Obituary

This week I’ve invited a handful of collaborators I enjoy and admire to write guest posts that fit the scope of this space: “the art & science of creative action.” This first post comes from my good friend Marcus Hollinger, SVP of Marketing at Reach Records and the Head of Marketing at Portrait Coffee (no big deal…). You can find follow Marcus on Instagram at @marcushollinger and connect with him here.

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Write your project’s obituary. This same thing can be stated by saying, “begin with the end in mind.” This proverb works for many tasks ranging from redecorating a room to reimagining the picture that comes to mind when people think of specialty coffee. I know this is true because I have done the former more than once and I have worked over the past two years with a few friends to accomplish the latter through Portrait Coffee, an Atlanta-based specialty coffee business.

I currently serve as the Head of Marketing at Portrait and as I approach our campaigns, I prefer the vivid imagery of an obituary because it brings out the permanence of death. Embracing the idea of my own impermanence and the limited time my work may have on any one end user is very helpful because it helps me focus on impact. By focusing on impact, I have the chance at accomplishing something much greater than sales despite the needed return on investment. While I recognize impact is not always guaranteed, I’d much rather aim for it than purely sales, if for no other reason than I think it’s more interesting.

If you’re reading this blog, I think we might have that in common.

How to do it? It’s really this simple: the “obituary” challenge prompts me and my team to consider, “When this campaign runs, and the moment has died, what is the lasting feeling we want to leave the end-user with? What one line will ring in their heads and hearts?” By connecting this question with a few other exercises in our “Brand Briefing” practice, we’re able to set our sight on accomplishing human connection and rally designers, directors, and copywriters to the common end of helping the end-user arrive at this point.

Here’s an example of the obituary I wrote for “Ocean Liturgy,” a recent campaign aimed at capturing the complexity of African American coffee drinkers: “I feel understood.” We arrived at this after a few rounds of brainstorming and interviewing black coffee drinkers to see what matters most to them. The active insight emerged from discovering that black coffee consumers are a global and diverse people. In their (our) search for identity. there's a longing for connectedness that seems to put Black Immigrants and Americans at odds. However, we discovered that beneath the surface, it is this longing that actually connects them (us). We needed to set understanding as our target to bring home the "The Water Tells Our Story" and capture the imagination of black coffee drinkers to make a deep connection.

This practice has helped me uncover human insights that have impacted sales, but more importantly, it has helped me and my team leverage coffee as a platform to do good in Atlanta.

Write an obituary for your next project and see if it doesn’t help you uncover something special!

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