Pain Makes Money and Money Makes Pain

Sell the hole, not the drill. Exaggerate the sickness, not the remedy. Highlight the storm, not the shelter. You get it.

Image by Chris Abatzis

Sixty days or 60 minutes, there’s always a research element in the strategic development phase where I find myself in the meandering trenches of a consumer’s pain. It can be emotionally consuming when I dig deep towards the heart of the hurt.

I’m not looking away, though; I’m hell-bent on finding it. A glutton for the data of distress, if I may admit. 

The stronger the force field of pain is, the deeper I go—through a rabbit hole carved out of the consumer’s insecurities, fears and whining only a mother could endure.

On the way down this hole, my assumptions and biases are challenged, and I find cracks in my strategic thinking and, ultimately, the solutions offered by the brand I’m working for.

But as Hemingway puts it ever so eloquently: “We are all broken. That's how the light gets in.” 

As a strategic thinker, I try to get a sense of the consumer’s challenges so that I can position the brand as a trusted source of a better solution—this can turn into an ethical pro…