For years I got a call every couple of months by a different agency or party that they had this great idea. Always in for great ideas, I gave it a shot. “How about we build this huge interactive video wall in bars, from floor to ceiling? You can then talk and interact with people in bars on the other end of the world. It will create huge brand awareness for your brand for sure.“

After a couple of times and honing my skill to politely say “NO” to this novelty of an idea, I created a standard email to reply to these occasions. Obviously thanking them for their time and consideration but also if they could kindly fill in the following questions before having a follow upon this amzing invention:

1. Why would I talk to people on a screen rather than the real people in the bar around me?
2. If the other screen is halfway around the world, wouldn’t those people be sound asleep in bed while I’m in a bar?
3. How do you safeguard this expensive piece of tech if you hang it in a public and rowdy place like a bar?
4. What would a bar owner think if we were to place this huge screen in his carefully designed bar on a wall, drilling holes, laying out cables and wires and what not?

As you can imagine, somehow, I never received a response to this. Never heard back.

The fact that you can do something, does not mean you should. This goes for not only ontrade outlets, but any point of sale of a specific customer. So often do we forget to involve or even submerge ourselves into the world of our customers. On paper or in a PowerPoint presentation, it always works. It always makes sense. It is the art of knowing what goes on, when it goes on and why stuff goes on – at the POS, not at your desk. Only then are you able to pinpoint insights, needs and pains of your customer and design solutions to meet those.

But that is also a lot of work. Means you need to walk all those stairs down from your ivory tower. Being able to articulate these needs and transforming those into business solutions is what sets you apart in the office. Makes you successful.

If you want to get your team out of that tower and have a chat about this, give me a shout out, let’s do coffee.