Reﬂection: Mind Mapping

Challenge

I work as a brand strategy manager in an advertising agency. My job largely entails  creating interesting, witty and relevant content for various brands. My challenge is to  create such content, that leaves a smile on the viewer’s face in order to create brand  connect and increase the brand awareness. Every project involves development of  larger campaign ideas and its social media content. Each needs to be eﬀective and  build a sense of relatability. A team of 4 must handle the whole project. Timeline and  delivery for each project is rushed with a limited timeframe. Delivery ranges from 2  days to a maximum of 2 weeks. The team needs to focus on methods and techniques  that not only enables delivery within the given time but also ensure good quality  content and data understanding.

Selection

The team currently employs referencing as a method to develop content. It requires  looking and examining for existing content with the same theme and build insights  through that. For the development of good content, strong understanding of the  information, insights and patterns are necessary. For this reason, mind mapping is  selected as the design tool. In general, mind mapping involves looking for patterns and  strong insights from the existing data that is collected in the ‘what if’ phase.

Application

With the rise of online learning, in the recent times the demand for tabs and laptops  have seen a rise. However with this rise, there have been many concerns that the  buyers (parents) are facing. It was crucial for us to develop a campaign to sell these  tech products keeping in mind the parents and their concerns.

For the same, we started work on mind mapping by ﬁrstly collecting secondary data,  references across the web, and conducting a group study of 20-30 people, selected  from the speciﬁc target audience. This is then simply collated and put up on a board  (it’s like setting up a gallery).

The data collected from people revealed a lot of insights and concerns and focused on  the information beyond the surface level. This was then shown to the stakeholders. The  stakeholders in this case include the brand team of 4, the design team who would be  developing and executing the process and the client team that is in direct contact with  the client. Client team helps get a better perspective of the client business objectives.  Each stakeholder was given 15-30 minutes to note down their thoughts and  recommendations based on the information collected.

Post this we started developing our mind map. Each stakeholder put up their thoughts  on another board - these were clustered together based on the relevance of it as  opposed to other suggestions. This is where the ideas come to play. Interesting  insights and even ideas were picked up by leveraging the understanding of the  diﬀerent stakeholders. Using the insights from the stakeholders and secondary  research, we continued asking ‘so what?’ Till we reached an idea that works best for  the brand. We stopped mind mapping when we were able to clearly identify buyer pain  points (Eg: pertaining to their child’s digital health, impact on eyes due to longer screen  time, etc) and the product features that connect well and help resolves these issues.

For the experiment, 2 people from the team were called with one using the existing  approach and another testing out the Mind Mapping approach. With a timeline of a  day, the results and ideas of the two were observed. This helped in identifying the  impact of the Mind Mapping design tool.

Insight

By applying the mind mapping tool, the team was able to identify insights and patterns  that were otherwise diﬃcult to point out. It was able to easily capture the consumer  pain points.  As expected, the ideas developed from mind mapping returned better and  more unique ideas as compared to our existing approach of merely referencing content  online. The use of mind maps and getting varied perspective helps provide an intuitive  and holistic approach. The visualization further helps to draw out patterns and unique  insights for campaign development. While I have learnt about the eﬀectiveness of mind  mapping, it has shown to be a time consuming process.

Approach

Moving forward, I would certainly use mind mapping for the initial stages of the  campaign development. This is keeping in mind the positive eﬀects of the mind  mapping tool and the time constraints. Understanding the time constraints for content  development, mind mapping may not be suitable for smaller projects that require the  delivery in a day. However, it can play an important role is larger campaign  development. Therefore in the future, during campaign ideation, once we have access  to the ‘what is’ data I will include the mind mapping steps to ensure a well rounded and  holistic approach.

