I've been rereading "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" recently. First off, love this book, it appeals to many of my sides. The geek side loves the weird, creative sci-fi and my intellectual side revels in all the satire sprinkled into the (very twisted) storyline.
At one point in the story, the main characters find themselves on a ship full of marketers, accountants, and other "middlemen". They had been told their planet was doomed and that the entire population was to get into 3 giant ships and colonize another planet. The great thinkers in one, the middle men in a second, and the people who did the actual work in a third. They gave the middlemen a "head start". Turns out they just wanted to get rid of the middlemen.
Once the ship lands on what later is revealed to be prehistoric earth (yeah I told you the plot was bazaar) they begin trying to establish a civilization. After 500+ committee meetings, nobody has so much as discovered fire. One of my favorite quotes, and perhaps this strikes me as so funny because I'm now in marketing, is when a marketer in the group says (regarding their failed attempts at discovering fire) " you know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them."
This got me thinking. Is it possible that we, as marketers, get so caught up in analysis and research that we lose sight of what might be a simple, elegant, and easy solution?
I'm not saying that we should just wing it with every new idea and product. There is a reason for research, a good reason, but does that sometimes get in the way of true creativity or blind some of us to the simplest solutions?
