A few months ago, I was talking with a friend about a company I was helping to launch. This company - a disruptive financial services startup - offered an entirely new way to think about retirement planning. It wasn’t an easy idea to communicate, it’s a topic that people generally don’t think about that often, and the core service offering was highly quantitative, which can intimidate people quickly.

My friend and I reviewed my preliminary ideas on imagery, tone of voice, market positioning, and a tagline that had been proposed for the company.

I felt that the tagline had ‘legs’ - there were many ways we could extend the line across a marketing campaign. It could work for both B2C communications as well as B2B communications. It could support different types of imagery and convey different meanings. It could be clever and it could be serious. It was, in my humble opinion, catchy.

My friend - a branding expert - cautioned me. “You need to unpack this some more” he advised.

It was a lightbulb moment. I had made the mistake of latching on to something catchy and relatively easy, without deeply understanding the customer experience. I needed to further analyze this business and break it down into its component elements. While my tagline resonated with the internal team, did it really convey all of the important elements of the business to a potential buyer? The team stepped back, considered our business more deeply, and made changes.

What has stuck with me is the concept of unpacking an idea, and I’ve used it many times since then.

Think about your most recent market research project - did you really take the time to unpack your objectives? Unpack your methodological approach? Unpack your findings? Unpack your explanation of the results?