A reminder from Einstein

Yesterday we went for our first book crit. We had spent most of the night trying to polish and refine the work that we have created so far.

Personally, I think I’ve been slightly putting off going to agencies, because of the nerves about taking the first step and actually showing someone outside of SCA what we’ve been working on. As we arrived for our meeting it was actually a lot less nerve-racking then I had thought. We were a little nervous but more excited.

When we got in we were asked to wait and found ourselves waffling and ranting at each other about random things like Phrenology, and bickering about who knew more about London. But by the time we actually went into our meeting, we had managed to control ourselves and were looking forward to getting some advice and feedback.

We had known from the start that we weren’t going to get a big thumbs up or a pat on the back for what was in our book. We knew if anything there was a greater chance of our book being scrapped entirely, which is sort of what happened. But not in the way we had expected.

We were told at the beginning before we had gone through the work, that our first book is going to be shit and chances are so is our second, but this is the process.

As we went through our work, we were helped to look at which aspects of our ideas were working, which needed redirecting and which just needed to be pulled altogether.

As we walked away, we were back to rambling, but this time feeling enthused and motivated to get on and come up with new ideas that we could then return with.

The feedback we had been given, although not good, was in a weird way massively positive and had given us a huge boost of energy.

Overall, the key things that I took away were, first off — interrogate the product. I think one of the patterns I have found myself falling into when coming up with ideas, is a fixation on trying to find the target audience and finding a truth about how that audience would relate. But what I’ve been MISSING is that we shouldn’t just be reframing the emotional connection of how the consumer sees the product, but actually reframing the product altogether.

The second thing was that the work in our book needs to be reflecting the problems that are important to us personally, and those that we feel need to be solved.

Lastly — the idea always needs to trump craft! We were told a quote from Einstein, saying that we ought to “spend 55 minutes defining the problem and the remaining 5 minutes solving it”. This made us realise that instead of having spent however many hours the night before on tweaks and changes, we should have been pushing the ideas.

Walking away from our first book crit we’re now looking forward to the next. So a Huge thank you to Stu from Creature for giving us a massive push in the right direction!