Studio Note #60: The Wrong Answer, Done Right.
Sometimes, a flyer just isn’t enough.
A friend recently asked me to help her create a leave-behind for cold calls. She works in payment processing and wanted something she could leave at a restaurant if the manager wasn’t available or didn’t have time to talk. She already had a few concepts for flyers, and they were fine. They explained what she did, listed some of the benefits and gave people a way to get in touch with her.
We could certainly make them better. Better headline, better hierarchy, stronger value proposition, less information fighting for attention. All the usual stuff.
But at the end of that process, we’d still have a flyer.
That started to feel like we were answering the wrong question. What she actually needed wasn’t a flyer. She needed something she could leave behind that would make someone curious enough to look at it, understand why she had been there and hopefully remember her after she walked out the door.
Once we started thinking about it that way, the conversation changed.
She sells payment processing and wants to onboard more restaurants, so what if the leave-behind came inside a check presenter?
It immediately gave the whole thing a context. A branded pen belongs inside. Her business card fits naturally into the slot where the credit card normally goes. The actual promotional piece sits where you would expect to find the check. Even before someone reads a word, the object itself is already connected to what she does.
Now we’re working on something much more interesting than figuring out how to arrange information on another sheet of paper.
Of course, putting something in a check presenter doesn’t automatically make it good. We still have to figure out what goes inside. The value proposition needs to be compelling. The copy needs to be clear. The design needs to make someone want to engage with it. There’s still plenty of work to do.
But at least we’re solving the right problem.
I think this is something that gets overlooked in creative work because we tend to start with the deliverable. Someone asks for a brochure, so we design a brochure. They ask for a new website, so we start thinking about a website. They ask for a logo, so we start drawing logos.
Sometimes that’s exactly the right response. But sometimes the thing someone asks you to make is just their best guess at how to solve the actual problem.
There’s a difference between executing that request well and understanding what they’re really trying to accomplish.
And sometimes the most valuable creative decision you can make is realizing they don’t need a better flyer.
They need something else.