“We have learned more about the brain in the last 15 years than in all prior human history, and the mind, once considered out of reach, is finally assuming center stage,” wrote Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, in his 2014 book . Kaku was right: The fMRI—or functional magnetic resonance imaging, a tool that allows noninvasive study and mapping of brain activity—was only invented in 1990. It has been essential in understanding the human brain. 

In marketing, the brain assumed center stage in 2002 with the first neuromarketing experiments. These studies—which used tools like fMRI, but also EEG (electroencephalography, a method for measuring brain waves) and biometrics (tools such as face and fingerprint scanners)—examined the intersection of consumer behavior and neuroscience to determine how consumers may respond to an ad, brand or campaign. 

The purpose of neuromarketing is to figure out whether customers might pay attention to an ad, says Roger Dooley, author of  and owner of the . If consumers pay attention, will they be affected emotionally? The answer can indicate buying intent, Dooley says. 

In a study published in the Journal of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues, titled ” the authors say that an ethical concern for neuromarketing is that it will give brands super-effective means to surreptitiously “push the buy button” in a customer’s mind. Marketing News spoke with Dooley—who has been writing about neuromarketing for more than a decade—about the ethics and capabilities of neuromarketing and whether it can “push the buy button.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

MN: What are the ethical standards for neuromarketing research and the application of its findings?

RD: Most companies providing neuromarketing services would say that they operate in an ethical way, just as any advertising agency would. They’re not going to intentionally promote anything that’s deceptive or illegal. Most neuromarketing companies avoid testing kids under 18. They’re not trying to do neuromarketing studies on toddlers to figure out how to hook them onto their product; most people would find that pretty creepy. 

The question runs along all advertising: Are you doing things in a way that is honest and helpful to the consumer? Things that are not going to do harm? Are you helping the consumer decide to buy something they’re going to regret? If so, it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing, whether a marketing study or using deceptive ad copy—you shouldn’t do it. 

I’ve been reading about neuromarketing since about 2005 when there was a big concern that somehow brands were going to create these ads that would take over the customer’s brain and turn them into a buying drone. They’d be able to create ads that were so powerful that consumers would just do what they say. But that’s really a false concept. If those kinds of ads could be created, decades of work by Madison Avenue folks would have created at least a few of those ads by accident. 

The fact is that advertising has a limited impact. To me, it ends up being not a question of “Are you somehow using your marketing studies to create incredibly powerful ads?” but “Are you promoting a product or service that is good for the consumer?” And that’s not a neuromarketing question, that’s an advertising question. 

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MN: A concern might be undue influence on a consumer’s decision, but that’s a debate between old-school economics and behavioral science as to whether the average consumer has a rational mind or not. 

RD: Well no, of course they’re not of rational mind. People do not make decisions based on totally rational criteria, even though most people will tell you that they do. Rational criteria certainly enter decision-making, but I’m not going to buy a $1 million Lamborghini for rational reasons. 

Certainly some decisions have rational elements or are almost completely rational. If you have to replace a broken part, there’s not much emotion involved. But for most consumer purchases—automobiles, health and beauty products, food, fragrances, beer—there’s a strong nonrational component. Brand associations are important because they’re emotional, even though people would tell you that they made those decisions because they liked the flavor of one versus the other. 

MN: Can neuromarketing deepen the emotional affinities consumers have for a product or brand? 

RD: Oh yeah, and advertising can strengthen that brand affinity and emotional attachment. Take a real classic like : They created a stunning advertisement that was engaging, exciting to watch and a heroic moment. I’d say it made Mac owners feel more emotional about their attachment to the brand. And to that extent, a neuromarketing study might help you show that the “1984” ad was more engaging than the  that Apple ran the next year. If you’re talking about analyzing ads using your marketing techniques—for instance, a 30-second spot on TV—the big advantage to neuromarketing isn’t that you’re going to create these amazingly powerful ads, but hopefully you can get rid of some of the ads that suck. 

There are all kinds of studies that show that more than half of all the ads used by brands don’t move the needle. They don’t create brand preference at all. That’s the benefit neuromarketing offers to advertisers: You can identify those ads that simply don’t work and will annoy the viewer. Good neuromarketing studies can perhaps help an advertiser choose what works best or at least engages the consumers the most. They can eliminate the ads that are ineffective or destructively bad. 

MN: In the scholarly article “Is Neuromarketing Ethical? Consumers Say Yes. Consumers Say No,” the authors mention that another top concern for neuromarketing is customer privacy. Have you seen any privacy issues in neuromarketing?

RD: Traditionally, neuromarketing studies were not highly personalized. Taking a small group of consumers, testing them and then scaling up the results doesn’t really raise privacy issues. 

Now, with increased digital information and trackability, we have allowed more personalized approaches. I’ve seen some companies claim that they can ask a consumer a small number of questions and determine which quadrant of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator they fall into, for example, which might dictate a different marketing approach. It’s hard for me to say how effective this is, but the possibility certainly exists. There are psychological factors being added to your digital profile along with all your other behaviors that are being aggregated. 

If you combine all this and target ads to people with specific characteristics, then that could be a good or a bad thing. It’s like if you are looking for a new suitcase, and as a result of your behavior, you start seeing suitcase ads everywhere. That could be good because it’s showing you other options than the ones you considered, or it could be really annoying and creepy if you already bought the thing. 

Personality-targeted ads could be the same way: You might find that you’re seeing better ads because, by and large, an untargeted ad from a consumer standpoint is the worst kind of ad. An untargeted ad is very likely to be meaningless. Maybe ads targeted to you based on your behavior or some personality characteristics would be a good thing. On the other hand, some people don’t want targeted ads because they don’t want to be identified or tracked. 

MN: It seems neuromarketing is a piece of the puzzle, but as you said, marketers and advertisers have to stand on a set of principles. Would marketers be wise to consider how they’d want their own data used as consumers?

RD: Right. One area that is particularly sensitive is political marketing. People could see neuromarketing techniques as even more creepy when using them in politics versus selling detergent or beer.

MN: Sure, and there’s more potential to use data to target different political groups so that only those groups see the ads—.

RD: Right. And again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing in an abstract sense. If you have a product that’s going to appeal to a relatively limited number of people, then it’s great. You’re spending less on advertising and you’re not annoying the people who don’t care about your product. When you apply it to some sort of distasteful political subculture where you’re trying to aim only at a hate group, that gets to be undesirable.

MN: How should marketers stay vigilant in using neuromarketing ethically?

RD: Ask if the outcome is going to be good for the customer. Advertisers are always trying to make ads more effective—that’s been true since the first days of advertising. Neuromarketing is a tool for eliminating the worst ads, not necessarily creating ads that are going to drive consumers into doing things they don’t want to do. But you do have to get to a deeper question: Is the product or service you’re advertising good to the buyers you’re targeting? 

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 got her first taste of online fury in the era of the blogosphere. It was the mid-2000s, and she was handling marketing and communications for JohnsonDiversey (now Diversey Inc.). Suddenly, blog and forum posts popped up asking for people to boycott Jo​hnsonDiversey and sign petitions against its wage and environmental practices. Legocki thought the angry activist posts were a small, yet curious, blip on her marketing dashboard.

A few years later, as director of social media relations at California State University East Bay, she saw more anger—a lot more. “That’s where Twitter really became involved,” she says. “There were more technologies that allowed us to monitor our brand name and keywords, and that’s when we started to see a lot of that anger and venting.”

Businesses of all sizes—from ma-and-pa sandwich shops to Fortune 500 companies—have felt social fury. A brand doesn’t need millions of followers to deal with angry, sometimes vindictive, customers online. 

“My experience as a practitioner drove me to want to know how to deal with it,” Legocki says. “This is not going away. In fact, it’s increasing.”

As Legocki transitioned from working as a practitioner to studying for her doctorate in business administration, the anger on social media held her attention. Research on social anger against brands is thin, so she decided to do her own. Legocki spends her days monitoring “outrage events,” which she says have grown exponentially, giving her plenty of ammunition for her studies. 

In one such study, still under review, Legocki and , also of California State University, wanted to find the patterns of angry posters during outrage events. Legocki and Walker ranked 14,000 English words on an emotional scale and studied reactions to three different social media crises—in all, they examined 9,500 tweets. The researchers separated tweets by behavioral intention, emotional intensity and number of characters. 

The study found something surprising: Most social media anger is composed of retweets. People usually tweet something angry once and exit the conversation. But a small group of less vitriolic—but more persistent—posters may be cause for concern.

According to the study, 80.9% of those who speak out against brands on social media are “hotheads,” people who vent and post emotionally charged content toward brands, mostly through retweets. The other 19.1% are “rational activists,” people who write original content with low emotional intensity focused on harming and seeking remedy from brands. The rational activists may seem less explosive—they usually aren’t cursing or telling you to die—but Legocki says that they may deserve brands’ attention.

“Nearly 84% of all consumers participating in one of three social media crises we examined posted fewer than two times, an average of 1.19 times,” Legocki and Walker wrote in the research paper. “With only 16% of consumer activists writing original content, the quality of a post may be worth more of a brand’s time than simply the quantity of posts.”

On most occasions, Legocki says that angry social media posters will retweet another angry post, adding their own brief commentary—perhaps a “WTF” or an angry emoji. But marketers should pay attention when calmer online posters call for action.

“They’re not going to let it go,” Legocki says. “Their language is not inflammatory. It’s very well-thought out, it’s low emotion and very rational. As a practitioner, I know that I tend to overlook them because it’s not high-arousal, it’s not inflammatory.”

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Some Fury Strengthens Brands 

Outrage events often have negative outcomes.  stepped down after a series of public gaffes. United Airlines lost the trust of many customers—and took a momentary-but-gigantic stock hit—when a video of police and United employees forcibly dragging a passenger off a flight was posted to social media. 

But are all online outrage events equally bad for brands? Not necessarily, says .

Scholz, assistant professor of marketing at California Polytechnic State University, says that some brands can use outrage events to their advantage. While brands should respond to and apologize for mistakes, harmful products and mistreatment of customers, Scholz believes some outrage events— “firestorms,” he calls them—can strengthen a brand’s position and bond with its customers. 

. Protein World, a U.K.-based supplement brand, created a gigantic advertisement featuring a photo of a lean, bikini-clad woman with a caption asking, “Are you beach body ready?” Many critics accused the company of; the company disagreed, saying that it was empowering people to be healthy. But the company didn’t just leave it there—it stirred the pot on social media, tweeting that “We are a nation of sympathizers for fatties” and calling its critics “lazy and weak.”​

Usually, this kind of vitriol from a brand would mean a fast apology, but Scholz says that it was part of the company reframing the criticism in its favor. Protein World’s brand voice has been bombastic, but it has also been supportive of healthy eating habits, motivational for those who exercise and empowering for followers trying to get healthy. The controversy fit Protein World’s brand. 

“It provided an opportunity for Protein World to say that we are strong in this crisis, and that resonated with the customer,” Scholz says. Although online outrage events may feel routine, they’re still a new phenomenon. Nobody has figured out a perfect way to respond to them or stop them, nor have researchers figured out what effect they can have on brands. But Legocki and Scholz agree that most marketers are not prepared for the moment when these events happen to them. They offer this advice based on their studies.

Monitor Your Keywords

Brands should monitor keyword notifications for words like “boycott” and “greed” plus the brand name, Legocki says. These words are calling cards of the more-effective, longer-lasting rational activists.

Not every mention will lead to action, she says, but if petitions start popping up, that’s a sign for brands to address their critics. At this point, rational activists are looking for brands to make changes, and they likely won’t let it go until those changes are made. 

Stay Calm

The first thing marketers should do during an outrage event is step away from the screen and stay calm, Legocki says. Don’t get caught up in the arousal and colorful language of the hotheads. Staying calm may be hard. It’s not every day that most marketers look at their social dashboard and see 500 people furiously tweeting at them, but Legocki says that calmness will help marketers figure out their next steps without falling into the hotheads’ trap. 

“If it’s just a lot of retweets, chances are that it’s the kind of people who are looking to vent, the hotheads,” she says. “They’re going to retweet 1.2 times, and that’s it. They’re out of there.”

In the heat of an outrage event, marketers spend much of their time responding to these hotheads, Legocki says, but she believes these high-arousal users are simply looking for the comradery of fellow hotheads. 

“They’re not looking for much from the company beyond maybe the obligatory apology,” she says. “The best thing for the practitioner is just to apologize and move on.”

Use Outrage to Grow

Brands should always avoid being nasty, Scholz says, but brands that want to use outrage to their advantage should find a balance between infuriating their critics and keeping their brand voice. Wendy’s has seemingly perfected this balance on Twitter. The company, with nearly 3 million followers, regularly makes fun of followers and competitors. It once responded to an error-filled tweet from McDonald’s with “When the tweets are as broken as the ice cream machine.”

For outrage to benefit a brand, Scholz says that companies must understand their customers, their critics and the potential firestorm they’re facing. 

“I think there are a couple of steps you want to follow: First you want to ask yourself how right your critics are. Do they have a point?” he says. If they do, it may be better to acknowledge their point, apologize and move on. “The next question you have to ask is to what extent the crisis or controversy fits your brand.”

If the crisis or controversy doesn’t fit the brand, he says that it’s best to leave it alone.

Reassess Your Approach

No matter how marketers respond to social outrage, they should always be willing to change their tactics. 

Protein World went too deep into the firestorm, Scholz says. At one point, the company’s CEO sent tweets—now deleted—challenging the mental health of critics and comparing some to beached whales. Scholz says that the company lost its moral high ground in a flash. “The very thing they were criticized for, they were then guilty of,” Scholz says. The company has since taken a lighter tone with critics on social media, he says. 

Companies should also be willing to change because there’s simply no right way to respond to outraged social media users. Legocki has spoken with peers and practitioners and read advice from experts; every answer they give seems to suggest something different. Do nothing? Issue a press release? Stir the pot to make people angrier? Apologize? No one knows the right way to deal with social outrage. For now, it’s situational.

“That’s one of the reasons I chose to study this,” Legocki says. “We’re all dealing with it in small ways, and it catches us by surprise.” 

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Finding and Defining Problems

Three days after graduating high school,  joined the U.S. Navy and began solving problems. He learned a technique called that let him find and fix problems with radars, computers and weaponry. During one gunfire support mission, he found that a gun was shooting bullets 3,000 yards beyond where the military thought capable—Nickols wrote up the problem and the weapons system was modified to show its more accurate, longer range. “That was a nice beneficial side effect,” he says with a chuckle.

After leaving the Navy, Nickols worked for 40 years as an executive and business consultant and found that business problems could be grouped into the same three categories as they were in the Navy. There are find-and-fix problems, like the gun that shot too far. These problems are easily definable and have definite solutions. There are problems where businesses simply want to improve. “Nothing’s broke, but you want much better than what you have,” Nickols says. Then there are the problems where businesses have a void to fill and must create something new. “You’re starting from scratch,” he says. “You don’t have anything in place, but you’ve got to put something in place to create the results you want.

“You’ve got to decide up front: Are you trying to find something and fix it, are you trying to improve what you have or are you building something from scratch?” Nickols says. 

A caveat to finding and defining problems is the distinct difference between problems that have a single solution and those that don’t, according to , a professor at Bowling Green State University’s College of Business and co-author of . Single-solution problems—“efficiency questions,” Browne calls them—will have one answer that is clearly better than the rest. If shipping products has become too expensive, for example, there’s likely one answer that works best to reduce costs. But in more complex problems—“critical thinking problems,” Browne says—the best answer depends on perspective.

“If a firm is having difficulty and the marketing director says, ‘You should spend more money providing incentives to our sales staff,’ but one of the production engineers says, ‘You could save more money by spending more on automated equipment,’ that’s not going to be something that every reasonable person in the room is going to agree with,” Browne says, “because their assumptions are different.”

Consider critical-thinking problems this way: Your back hurts, so you make appointments with an exercise physiologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a holistic health guru. Each will use knowledge of their specialty to give you a different solution for your back pain. They could debate for hours without reaching a single conclusion. As psychologist Abraham Maslow quipped in 1966:

This initial stage of problem-solving—defining the problem—is where most businesses stumble, says , founder and CEO of KnowlEdge Srl, associate professor of system dynamics modelling at Stellenbosch University and co-author of . There are many ways companies can misidentify problems, but Bassi says that their biggest mistake often occurs when they define a problem by its symptoms instead of its causes, main effects and true drivers. Addressing the symptoms can help eliminate short-term issues, Bassi says, but it likely won’t solve the long-standing problems and could create more. 

associate professor of system dynamics modelling at Stellenbosch University and co-author of . There are many ways companies can misidentify problems, but Bassi says that their biggest mistake often occurs when they define a problem by its symptoms instead of its causes, main effects and true drivers. Addressing the symptoms can help eliminate short-term issues, Bassi says, but it likely won’t solve the long-standing problems and could create more. 

Most problems emerge from within organizations rather than originating from the outside, Bassi says. “We tend to think that things are imposed onto us, and we need to find solutions, but in fact, we’re normally creating problems with our behavior,” he says. “If you use a systemic approach, you can figure out more lasting and more effective solutions.”

But before moving into a systemic approach, it’s important to go beyond the surface of what the problem could be and find out exactly what it is. In this stage, Nickols says that companies must avoid locking in on one solution by asking many questions: What functions do you want to be able to perform, and who must be able to perform them? What kind of data structure do you want in the system? 

“Over time, the picture of the system that you’re building will begin to emerge and finally crystallize,” Nickols says.

But the questions should never stop, even if the problem crystalizes. Questions, according to Browne, are likely the most important part of the next step: Creating the team that will solve the problem.

Building the Problem-Solving Team

In 2009, nonprofit  posted a problem to InnoCentive, an open-innovation and crowdsourcing platform. Prize4Life wanted to find the biomarker for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease that seemingly comes out of nowhere. Prize4Life offered problem-solvers , Dr. Seward Rutkove of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston found it. Six years later, Prize4Life used the pool of more than 1,000 problem-solvers on InnoCentive to find ways to predict disease progression in ALS patients, awarding problem-solvers smaller cash prizes. 

InnoCentive’s crowdsourcing system brings in problem-solvers from outside the organization, granting access to the eyes, brains and problem-solving abilities of people who may have never worked in medical research. Jon Fredrickson, chief innovation officer at InnoCentive, says that using outsiders allows companies to look at a problem differently than they would by assembling a team from inside. 

But what if a company has access only to its own employees?

Companies should form a problem-solving team where each member brings a different perspective, writes Antonio E. Weiss in his book . Each team member must feel comfortable giving feedback to one another: “Feedback is just as much about giving constructive praise as constructive criticism,” he writes. “And feedback can be given by any team member, no matter how junior or inexperienced.” Weiss writes that all team stakeholders need to understand what the problem is, what a good solution looks like, when the solution needs to be delivered and the context surrounding the problem. 

, a business management consultant and author of , says that cultivating an environment where feedback is acceptable takes something organizations often lack: vulnerability.

“Very few people have all the answers, so you have to be able to create an environment of vulnerability and inclusivity within your organization for people to provide constant feedback and recommendations, regardless of hierarchy or rank,” Llopis says. “There are so many opportunities that are ignored because the individual doesn’t feel comfortable revealing them.”

Beyond stifling feedback, companies often involve too many high-level employees and not enough employees who deal with the problem’s issues every day, Bassi says. “They may not have enough knowledge of what’s going on,” he says of high-level personnel. “They miss what could be the root causes of a problem in the production chain. They may miss some of the considerations that actually drive them to find a lasting solution.”

To avoid missing insights, Bassi says that organizations should find a mix of knowledge from technical and managerial points of view. “You need someone with the vision of the higher level in a management position and those that work more on the technical level and see how the work is performed on the ground,” he says. 

Nickols, the Navy serviceman who went on to solve problems his entire career, says that he has a few basic principles for forming a problem-solving team. First, there must be someone in a position of authority. In addition, he agrees with Bassi: There must be people who know the system well. “I don’t want newbies and trainees,” he says. “I want people who have the respect of their peers.” Nickols says that the team also needs a sponsor, someone who will give the project authority and support behind the scenes and get all departments to buy into the team’s work. Finally, he suggests adding a “straw boss,” someone who ensures the team has everything it needs. 

In the book , authors Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rasmussen suggest that businesses frame problems in a way that allows employees to be curious. “Reframe the problem as a phenomenon,” the authors write. “If your team can create a shared understanding of the problem and agree on what you and the rest of the team don’t know, it is much easier to accept new ways of solving the problem.”

In Brian Tracy’s book , he suggests that teams hold both “mindstorming” and brainstorming sessions. In mindstorming sessions, each team member takes a sheet of paper with the problem or goal at the top, then writes 20 answers using the first-person voice and action verbs. The question, “What can we do to double our sales and profitability in the next 24 months?” could be answered with ideas like, “We hire and train 22 new sales people.” In brainstorming sessions, Tracy widens the scope by including four to seven team members and having them generate ideas together for 30 minutes, staying positive and saving the criticism of ideas for after the meeting. 

Throughout the problem-solving process, Browne says, teams—especially those working on critical-thinking problems—should focus on a series of evidence-focused questions, such as “Do you have any financial interest in the answer to this question?” and “How much experience do you have in using this evidence?” Although many people may find this kind of critical thinking aggressive, Browne says that questions foster a better understanding of what team members know and why they believe their solution would work best. Team members should ask questions respectfully, with curiosity and with willingness to understand new information. 

After all the ideas, questions and evidence are on the table, Browne says that teams must quickly decide on a solution. “We can’t analyze this thing the rest of our lives,” he says. “We have to make decisions in a business environment more quickly than people typically do.”

At this point, digging into the problem through a map and problem statement will be useful. 

Making a Map

After the problem-solving team pours out its ideas and questions, the organization may realize that there is more than one right answer and many potential side effects. This is why everything—ideas, questions, potential side effects—should be recorded and arranged when digging into the problem. The end goal is to have a problem statement, a map of the company’s problems. 

Maps allow multiple different perspectives—economic, social, environmental—to be listed and listened to. The map will give problem-solvers what Bassi calls a “horizontal view” of the problem. 

“If I work on economics and finance, I can’t appreciate the work that others do, nor can I see how their performance is affecting my performance or how my performance is affecting the work of others,” he says. 

Nickols agrees that maps are useful, similar to a cartographer charting the territory she’s exploring. “The complete map is never done,” he says. “You will regularly get enough of it to get to where you want to be. But there’s still a lot of uncharted territory out there.”

A map will also allow companies to know some of the solution’s performance indicators and potential side effects. “We must first figure out what the indicators of performance are and how they are connected to one another,” Bassi says. “Once you know indicators of performance, you can find the person responsible for a certain type of performance or one who has a good view of what’s happening and why we are underperforming in one of the other areas.”

A written system of performance indicators will show organizations causes and effects of different decisions, allowing the problem solvers to understand how different solutions could affect other areas of the business. If one part of the business is changed, and that change affects another part, this view of the problem-solving process may allow the organization to understand why. Without the map, the events may seem disconnected. 

Another way to arrange a problem statement comes from Weiss’ Key Business Solutions, wherein he suggests that companies use the ABC—or arrange, brainstorm, choose—method to break down a problem. Using this technique, companies “arrange” by setting a clear goal, generating evaluation criteria and informing the team of the analysis. Then, they “brainstorm,” group similar ideas together and find new ideas, treating all ideas equally. Finally, they “choose” by adding details to the solution and scoring outcomes against set criteria. 

Digging into a problem allows a company to avoid using a canned approach to problem-solving. Nickols says that most organizations are “committed to canned approaches,” no matter what kind of problem they’re up against. “It just doesn’t work,” he says, adding that most people realize how complex problems are after looking at questions, concerns and potential side effects.  

After the map has been drawn up, it’s time to implement a solution.

Finding and Implementing the Solution

When Nickols worked as an executive director at  in the early 1990s, the rejection rate for one of the company’s health care certification tests was more than 70%. That was too high, he says—test-takers’ careers were on the line. 

The clerical staff at ETS were convinced that people filling out the forms were inept, but Nickols saw that the problem was the system itself. Half of the rejects had an invalid or missing institutional code, a number that identified where the registrant was trained or would be employed, he says. The other half were rejected because of sloppiness, such as leaving fields blank that needed to be filled in. 

To fix the problem, Nickols told the clerical staff to ensure registrants were instructed that ETS wanted a “clean and complete” registration form with all fields filled in. He also realized that registrants were given a numerically ordered institutional code list that they’d have to scan for their institution. To fix this issue, Nickols told staff to give registrants an alphabetically ordered list of institutions. After ETS made the changes, the rejection rate plummeted from 70% to 9%, Nickols says. 

Although this problem seemed easy to solve, Nickols documented everything, just as he would when mapping any other problem. He did this in part to be accountable and responsible, but also because he got the same question from other executives after each problem: “How the hell did you do that?” 

“It’s partly a matter of being accountable,” he says. “It’s partly a matter of sharing what was learned with others. It’s partly a matter of having a record that’s more than just a history. Think of it as a problem-solving memory.”

This problem-solving memory will help companies stay vigilant for side effects of the solution with an organization-wide view, Nickols says. 

������, authors Gerald Nadler and William J. Chandon suggest that businesses should create a “living solution” to problems. The living solution is similar to the solution companies plan for, but the living solution takes into account a changing environment. 

Nadler and Chandon suggest three steps toward a living solution: First, create a detailed description of recommended changes, coming as close as possible to the solution the company had been planning for, which they call the future solution. Then, plan for successive stages of change and improvement that move toward the future solution. Finally, have an installation plan to begin working on the stages of change. Nadler and Chandon write that there are challenges to having a living solution, including lack of resources, unavailable technology, changes in attitude or skepticism from key decision makers. To anticipate these challenges, the authors suggest that problem-solvers ask questions and think holistically about the living solution. 

Ask information questions like: What specific information needs to be collected to stay as close as possible to the future solution?

Ask questions of uniqueness like: How can we develop a living solution and an implementation plan that work within our environment and stay close to our future solution? 

Ask systematic questions like: What are potential input ideas for overcoming a challenge that prevents us from adopting the future solution now? 

Browne says that businesses should implement solutions as quickly as they decide on them. Although they will occasionally make mistakes, they will also become agile when dealing with problems. Businesses don’t often have four or five months to decide on a solution—by the end, they may have already lost millions of dollars—so quick decisions are imperative. 

“That’s where the role of leadership experience and knowing who, from the past track record, you can depend on,” Browne says. Though a good record doesn’t guarantee future success, he says looking for high-probability events is the best option.

InnoCentive’s Fredrickson uses a fishing analogy to show why companies must decide quickly on solutions. You can know all the best spots in the lake and catch the fish, but do you know what you’re going to do once you catch it? Will you eat it, take a picture and throw it back or simply let the fish rot in the boat, just as an unused idea lies dormant in a company? 

“Unless you are intentional and continue to experiment, you’ve just gone fishing—you caught some fish, but you really didn’t do anything with it, and it rots,” Fredrickson says. “At that point, it’s not innovation because you never really acted on what you found.” 

Once the solution is in place, companies must continue to test their theories, always willing to accept that they may have been wrong. 

Review Results, Analyze the Future and Always Try Again 

For 20 years, Browne and his wife were blackjack counters. “One of the things that always amused us was when we’d be flying to Vegas or Macau and there’d be people on the plane getting ready to play blackjack,” he says. “They’d all have a system and say, ‘I cleaned them out last time.’ They don’t understand: The dumbest monkey in the world could play blackjack and win—it’s just that over time, you lose. That’s the math of the system.”

Much like blackjack, solving problems isn’t an exact science, but it does require some scientific thinking and experimenting. Companies need to grow comfortable with making hypotheses and mistakes and learning from both. Much like card counters must recount when the deck is shuffled, businesses must anticipate a changing environment—measurements, criteria for success, people in the organization, outside factors. What can’t change is a company’s dedication to learning from mistakes and adjusting quickly.

“When you make a mistake, ask, ‘What did I miss? Why did I miss it? What did I fail to do?’,” Browne says. “That’s an analytical process of reviewing the bad decisions you made rather than just wallowing in the successes of the good decisions. Bill Gates has said that success is a lousy teacher; it makes people think they know what they really don’t know. I think that’s true.” 

Once a company implements a solution, Bassi says that it must monitor and evaluate the solution’s performance on an ongoing basis. Start-and-stop exercises—for example, checking the solution’s progress once a year—usually won’t work because companies tend to treat them more like a checkbox than an embedded part of the decision-making process, he says. Continuous evaluation allows companies to catch problems as they emerge, rather than once they are fully realized.

The map will be useful for ongoing monitoring, Bassi says. The company will see performance on departmental and organization-wide levels. If the solution has unforeseen consequences, the map will allow the company to see exactly where it went wrong and quickly fix the problem—or perhaps decide that what went wrong is preferable. 

Nickols says that the path companies take will vary for each solution. Sometimes, companies will think that they have the solution but find that their path leads to a brick wall. “That’s not because you chose the wrong path, it’s because nobody knew what the right path was,” he says. “There’s a lot of feeling your way along.” 

Instead of worrying about what’s at the end of each path, Nickols says that the best thing companies can do to is take a step and figure out where to step next. 

And if the business does reach a point where the problem is solved, there’s only one logical thing left to do: “Celebrate,” Nickols says with a laugh. “The more you succeed in solving issues and wrestling with issues, the more credible you’ll become.”

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Marketing is an exciting field with many well-paying jobs, such as brand strategist, content specialist and SEO manager. Only occasionally, though, is market research aspired to or sought after. Part of the reason is that the Internet of Things, SEO and search engine marketing have diffused traditional market research roles throughout organizations and renamed them as they relate to digital marketing or the customer/user experience, for example. 

Marketing research jobs have always carried a bit of a stigma as number-crunching, dead-end staff positions that do not afford a path to profit/loss experience and the vaunted corner office. The time has come to dispel that stereotype.

I graduated from college (in 1971) with what seemed like an unemployable degree: a bachelor’s in general studies. I was fortunate to stumble into a marketing research analyst position working for a fellow named C.R. Johnston, who had recently mentored J.D. Power, before his name became synonymous with customer satisfaction ratings. My initial responsibilities were not glamorous and included managing part-time field interviewers (who canvassed door-to-door in those days) and conducting shelf audits for beer brands. (Bar coding didn’t take off until the 1980s.) But by the time I went to graduate school four years later, I had co-authored the marketing plan for the Buick division of General Motors and run car clinics leading to the introduction of several new models. That job experience served as the foundation for my parallel careers in academics and global marketing information. 

My story is not an exception. As management guru Peter Drucker once noted, marketing and innovation are the two basic functions of business. Neither can effectively exist without a deep understanding of customer needs and values, which requires data. Call it whatever name you like, that data comes from marketing research. In the increasingly data-rich environment in which companies compete today, marketing research—not a hunch or gut-feeling—is the key source of insight on how to attract, retain and deepen customer relationships. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how today’s top executives can be successful without direct experience making sense out of this type of information.

The information that marketing researchers provide isn’t necessarily limited to the customer stakeholder group. Most marketing research agencies have tools to measure employee engagement and commitment, as well as to assess public perceptions of corporate social responsibility. It is not uncommon for those agencies, working alongside internal marketing researchers, to partner with other departments (such as human resources) in making those assessments. 

For these reasons, I believe marketing research is a good place to begin a business career. The paths that emerge from that experience can be quite varied. Some begin and end their careers in the marketing research field. On the agency side, with which I am more familiar, there are opportunities for entrepreneurs who may seek to own a certain niche or progress through positions of increasing responsibility in multibillion-dollar global firms such as Kantar or Ipsos. Others may branch out from marketing research, going into management consulting on the outside or brand/marketing management on the inside. Still others (like me) may find that their experience working with complex marketing research data gives them a leg up in the pursuit of a Ph.D. and an academic career.

I’m often asked about the right educational background for a marketing research job. An undergraduate degree in business is less important than having coursework in the social sciences (customers are people, after all), basic statistics (and ideally a course in regression analysis) and some knowledge of databases/coding. From there, I recommend a graduate degree after gaining two to four years of work experience. I’d suggest a master’s degree in marketing research for those planning to remain in the field and an MBA for those planning to branch out to marketing/business management or consulting.

Finally, in whatever path you may choose, it is important to grab hold of a developing trend affecting marketing and become a subject matter expert in the topic. This extra degree of specialization could be your route out of the cubicle. For me, it was customer satisfaction measurement. For today’s researcher, it might be smart products, the Chinese customer or omni-channel distribution.

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A brand’s service culture may be one of its only differentiators in a market of ever-consolidating, commoditized products and services. Brands that compete on price alone are racing to the bottom. They must stand out through culture.

Corporate culture, once defined by free food, weekly yoga and foosball tables, is something much greater now. It’s about how a company engages with its employees and its clients. The C-suite is starting to understand that corporate culture must be purposely created. No longer viewed as frivolous, it’s a key part of any brand’s authentic DNA, and if structured and nurtured correctly, it can become one of a brand’s most unique and powerful tools in its marketing toolbox.

Whether you know it or not, your company has a culture. Culture happens, good or bad, with or without active participation from leadership. Corporate culture can be determined by identifying, sharing and building a culture on a company’s guiding values — and yes, every brand should have clear guiding values. Corporate culture can foster creativity and free ideation or fear and stifling introversion. Either way, you will never know unless you examine and take an active part in structuring the culture your brand deserves, assuring it is aligned with the values of your leadership and your brand.

Getting Executive Buy-In

If leadership doesn’t buy in, company culture will be a free-for-all, no matter how many motivational posters you hang. Your culture has to resonate with your leadership, and it has to be authentic. Hiring practices follow suit: The people you hire must not only have the skills you need, but they must also have the personality, demeanor and value system that aligns with your brand. Hiring for cultural fit is another way culture design can clearly hit your bottom line. Attracting and retaining great talent aligned with your culture and goals makes for more productive people, more in-sync departments and a culture where failure and success are equally important.

Develop a Service Culture

At my company, we discovered one of the top priorities for future improvement was to add more structure to our culture. We needed to improve internal service to one another on our team and external service to our client partners. This factor is often overlooked by companies, but it can be the difference between success and failure.

Work with a trusted agency partner to help structure, articulate and implement your brand’s service culture. Create a purpose statement or common goal for all members of your organization, stated as simply and accurately as possible. Articulate service standards with a few words outlining the priorities that define your culture. Finally, define performance behaviors through a list of observable behaviors for which people can be held accountable, such as having a positive attitude, curiosity and integrity.

Advertising is just one tool in the marketing toolbox. Brands need a 360-degree holistic approach to their brand-building. Service culture affects all aspects of the brand, which is why it’s so important to get right.

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During a volunteer session at San Francisco-based nonprofit St. Anthony’s Dining Room, I heard many facts, but also a story that I’ve repeated dozens of times: A client left his engineering job to care for his wife, who had cancer. Their insurance ran out, and by the time she died six years later, he had sold his home, depleted all his savings and seen his engineering skills wither. He needed St. Anthony’s. It could happen to anyone. The statistics faded quickly, but the story stayed with me.

In this digital age, brand perceptions and relationships affect how customers, employees, partners and others evaluate their options when making a purchase, applying for a job or collaborating. It is critical for brands to communicate not only their offerings but also the purpose and heart of the organization. This task is made difficult by limited budgets, a glut of content and audiences that are disinterested and skeptical. 

Signature stories—authentic narratives that intrigue, involve and communicate who you are—break through distractions and disinterest to change perceptions, inspire and generate memories. Hundreds of studies have shown that stories are two to three times more effective at conveying a message than reciting facts. 

What is stopping organizations from making stories the cornerstone of their communications?

1. Don’t Believe and Don’t Commit

Getting organizations to believe in and commit to storytelling is a huge barrier to using stories. Many businesses make the comfortable and convenient assumption that their audience is logical and believes, as they do, that knowing facts about the brand’s offerings is both useful and worthwhile. That is rarely the case. More likely, the audience will ignore such messaging, and if it gets through, they will usually forget or distort it. 

2. Impact Stories Cannot Be Found 

Even when brands commit to elevating stories in the communication mix, it’s hard to come up with truly powerful stories. There is no checklist of effective story characteristics, but effective stories are built on interesting, empathetic and authentic people who are facing some kind of challenge that involves uncertainty, tension and, ideally, a surprise ending. Look for a plotline that is so entertaining, informative or awe-inspiring that the audience will feel compelled to pass it along.

Brands with utilitarian offerings must develop higher-purpose programs to feed their stories. Soap brand Lifebuoy developed three stories of how its hand-washing program helped children survive in three Indian villages. Video stories documenting the effort garnered 44 million views. 

3. Weak Presentation

Even strong stories can be rendered ineffective if poorly presented. Don’t rely on a customer or employees without professional experience to create a story. A story that is badly edited, confusing, incongruous or unpleasant to the eye will be difficult to amplify. 

A frequent error of storytelling is a lack of specific examples or details. Detail that makes the story vivid and intriguing will draw people in. Knowing the personality and motivations of a character can help the audience empathize and understand the challenges he or she faced.

Be intriguing at the outset. The story should grab the audience’s attention with the opening line or moment. Consider a story that begins, “It was a drab and rainy day in mid-May 1931 when the 28-year-old Neil McElroy, the advertising manager of P&G’s Camay soap, sat down at his Royal typewriter and wrote perhaps the most significant memo in modern marketing history.” What did the memo say? Why was it important? Who is this guy? What happened to him? You notice. You read on. You remember.

4. Mismanaged Story Program

Some storytelling programs are mismanaged. One indication of mismanagement is a lack of support staff to find, curate and refine the stories. One of the best users of stories, UC Health, has a team of seven people to support its story program. The team finds stories by hanging out with doctors and the story stars (patients at UC Health) before they create presentations. 

A huge problem, especially for firms that have avoided the first three pitfalls, is story overload. There is a tipping point after which there are too many stories for employees to manage or for customers to grasp. Organize your stories by message and prioritize stories by their level of influence. Stories can also be combined into meta stories. Molson Beer’s master story about creating a hockey rink in the Purcell Mountains for people who would do “anything for hockey” was surrounded by stories of the building challenges, the people selected to play and the final game. 

Signature stories can transform wasteful, ineffective communication programs, but organizations must overcome these four pitfalls to fully take advantage of them.

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