Time needed: 20 minutes | Effort: ⭐⭐⭐★★
The think-feel-do-framework is a marketing basic but incredibly useful for anything you’re creating for others. It’s now the start of each project, email, article that goes out to a customer, no matter whether internal or external, and helps me and my team to do the foundational thinking around what we’re trying to achieve upfront.
Disclaimer: Thinking about this is still hard but it helps tremendously in ensuring the impact of our output.
Here are the steps we go through before touching any of the “actual work”:
Who are we creating this for and why?The clearer an idea we have of our audience or end user, the better we know what challenges they need to address. Here’s where another framework comes in - the job to be done. I try to figure out what problem my collateral is solving by following this template sentence structure:When I… (context),But… (barrier),Help me… (goal),So I… (outcome).
Then I turn to the impact I’m hoping to achieve - the outcomes.
What do I want our stakeholders/audiences/users to:Do (Action): What action do we want a person to take? Examples: click on something, subscribe to a newsletter, call a customer, read an article etc.Feel (Emotion): For a person to take the above defined action, what emotion do they need to experience? Examples: Curiosity to learn more, excitement to test newfound knowledge, fear of missing out etc.Think (Perception): For a person to feel this emotion, what perception do we need to create? Examples: Trust in the information provided, confidence that following the process would benefit them etc.Know (Facts): For a person to have come to the above defined conclusions, what data do we need to provide? Examples: Concrete data points, social proof, concrete sources etc.
Only now that I have gained clarity about what problem I am solving for whom to achieve a certain impact, I can think about what approach to take to be successful.