Be foreign
For me it was Blade Runner. The worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars and yes, even the giant of sci-fi: Blakes 7, didn’t manage alien in quite the same way. Their landscapes all seemed familiar, borrowed from the ordinary and polished or roughed up in order to appear different. Even Welsh quarries didn’t manage to pull it off properly.
Blade Runner was different. It wasn’t so much the spaceships and killer androids that made the world of Blade Runner so alien, so futuristic; it was the element of Japanese in it all.
Whether the film had quite the same effect to the Japanese, I can’t say (though I hear they go nuts for Blakes 7) but to me, young teenager as I was at the time, Blade Runner was a plausible vision of the future.
More spaceships wouldn’t have made it any more plausible, nor would more gibberish tech or plastic clothing.
All of this occurred to me just two paragraphs into Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.
The reason?
The feel of foreign.
The future can be two things: familiar (so I’m waiting for Ken Loach’s multi-million dollar space opera) or foreign. It is the latter that brings out our sense of wonder.
Just as Blade Runner forced us to experience the future through foreign eyes so is it important to retain your own outsider status when it comes to answering a brief. The world in which the client lives is not the same world in which the consumer lives. It can’t be.
The client is familiar with the sales targets and campaign aims. The client has bosses to please whether they are shareholders or marketing directors. The client is not going to be buying their own product.
Being foreign is an approach that ought to stay with you every day.
Understanding the client’s business is important, sure. But presumably the client has a pretty good grasp of her own business.
Understanding her customer, being her customer, well that’s what can deliver effective and creative thinking.