A brief easing of TENSION

Consultants love saying that strategy starts with a problem to be solved.

And planners say the trick is turning a business problem into a consumer one.

Then comes the insight where the language shifts, to the tension to be resolved.

But can we honestly claim to make issues in people’s lives go away?

Or is this another case of marketing overplaying its hand, when all we’re doing is selling stuff?

This has been nagging me for a while, ever since I came up with the idea of ‘moments of closeness’ to describe how emotional connections work in the real world.

It’s not that I worry about our role. Helping companies selling their products is noble enough work for me.

But it feels like there’s a flaw in the argument. How can you solve a problem or resolve a tension when the act of choosing a brand is over in a second, with little or no conscious thought?

Anyway, there I was with this question circulating in my mind. So, like any good strategist, I went to the pub on a Saturday morning.

It was to watch the British and Irish Lions rugby team play a warm-up game against the Waratahs.

The game was a scrappy affair, with the Lions holding a slender lead until they scored a third try to make it 21-10. At which point the commentator said: “That should ease the tension a bit.”

Luckily, I had my antennae on receive. Out came the phone and down went a thought:

Brands don’t solve problems. They don’t even resolve tensions. They ease them temporarily.

The thing is, people are always managing internal conflicts. A Need Map only works if the needs opposite each other are, in some way, opposites. Freedom / Control, Empowerment / Reassurance, Status / Affiliation.

Think eating a cake, asking someone on a date, getting tickets for Oasis.

We all live in a state of tension and this drives our behaviour, often without us knowing. If a brand provides any kind of relief from these battles, it creates a positive association.

If you want to go deeper into this, look up Approach-avoidance Conflict Theory and Reward Prediction. In textbook text, when someone chooses a brand expecting tension relief and gets it, the brain rewards the choice and the brand becomes associated with the reward of tension reduction.

So maybe that’s how it works at the moment of both choosing and using a brand, the two moments of truth. But I think it’s good to call them ‘moments of closeness’ as a reminder this is all happening in Implicit-land.

And the more moments of closeness you create, the more people move closer to your brand. Consistent easing of internal tensions builds lasting associations and a growing connection over time.

Traditional brand tracking won't necessarily capture this. You really need an implicit association test or projection-based qual.

But my explicit point for discussion is brand-building isn’t about solving people’s problems forever.

It’s about easing their tensions as they move through life, even if just for a moment.