We are in the process of creating some CommonCraft style videos. Part of this process has been to develop a creative brief for the video production company that tells them who we are. They asked questions like:
- What does your organization do?
- Who is the audience of your video?
- What is the problem you are trying to solve?
- What is the solution you are providing?
- What is your call to action?
I found this to be quite instructive because, although I have been thinking about these issues for over a year now, it was interesting to be forced to put my marketing hat on and try to see things solely from our user’s perspective. Although we tried to structure our answers specifically for our future users, we fell into our old habit of describing the CAPTURE platform as an end to end knowledge cycle with various features to facilitate the turning of the wheel. The video people didn’t get it. They thought we were building a super portal in the style of the Canadian Best Practices Portal. We aren’t.
This misunderstanding wasn’t their fault though. It was entirely ours. I now know this from repeated experience. At our fall consultation, we described how we thought the knowledge cycle was fundamental to our existence but some of the participants flat out suggested we abandon the cycle and focus on just doing evaluation. But we didn’t listen. We were too much in love with the idea of telling people about how important the end to end solution is to the success of the system.
Essentially, we didn’t understand what the CAPTURE brand should be. This is a classic marketing blunder that is surprisingly easy to make when you are neck deep in all the interesting ideas that you want to tell the world.
The commercial world offers many, many lessons of how to avoid this pitfall. Nike, despite making a huge range of footwear from walking shoes to boots to track shoes, is known as a basketball shoe company. Many years after Michael Jordan ceased to be their main spokesperson, his aura pervades their brand. Nike is urban, hip and cool due to its association with basketball. They don’t try to cloud the issue by feeling the need to tell you about their hiking boots or flip flops every time you see their famous swoosh.
It is the same thing with Google. When you think of Google, you tend to think of search engines – after all “google” has become a verb meaning “to perform a web search”. But Google is one of the most innovative companies out there with dozens of amazing products hiding just below the surface of their deceptively simple home page. Google doesn’t sully their brand by shouting about their awesomeness and cluttering their homepage with links to their other products. Their brand is one of quiet confidence: a hushed awesomeness.
This brings us back to CAPTURE. We have confused a lot of people about who we are and what we are trying to accomplish because our branding has been unfocused. People have repeatedly told us (see here, here, here) that they want us to be the ones to help the program planning community collect and disseminate real world evidence. They were loud and clear in their insistence that we be the folks who drive the evaluation agenda. We realize that any commercial business would kill for this kind of market intelligence and we are listening. We now know that our brand is about evaluation and all ongoing communications will be laser focused on driving that point home. We’ll still continue building all kinds of other interesting features into the platform but we just won’t feel the need to shout about it.
April 14, 2010 at 10:26 am
I very much appreciated David’s “epiphany” blog posting about keeping CAPTURE’s focus on evaluation and capturing that real world evidence (might make a nice jingle to the tune of “give me that old time religion”). :)
This was the vision that first engaged the Partnership in funding CAPTURE. and it’s what keeps us excited about supporting CAPTURE as one of our four strategic initiatives in Primary Prevention. I would also add that in developing the Cancer Control PLANET web portal when I was at NCI, some of my favorite ideas, that I was sure were winners, were “trashed” within minutes of usability testing. It was a humbling and sometimes painful experience but in the end without some pain there is sometimes little gain.
So hang in there David, Marla, and Diane; I’m pulling for CAPTURE to make a real difference in linking the lessons learned from science with the lessons learned from practice and we at the Partnership will do everything we can to help you achieve that goal. All the best – Jon