Cultural Cartography: Tension Map Plots Brand Potential In Pain

By: Martin Agency VP/Group Director of Communications Planning, Taylor Grimes

A little over a year ago, I secretly made a pact to quit my job as I knew it. I found myself dragging down the very things I wanted to uplift: big ideas that can connect brands with humans. What was weighing me down? My tools were too rational, overly complicated and didn’t have a place in Martin’s mission to fight invisibility. Sure, I had the data. I could get to practicality, but ideas come from provocation. I could give context, but I needed curiosities. I was finding tactics, I needed to find tension.

It’s Martin’s POV that it takes tension to get attention—tension in the work, tension in culture. Tension is a springboard for talkability. And, if you haven’t read it from someone else, the most talked about brands grow 2.5x faster than the competition.

Hungry for a new tension-filled approach, I started reading behavioral economics giants like Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler. I also followed modern academics and practitioners like Marcus Collins and Kai Wright. The research was undeniable—95% of decisions are made subconsciously. What good is a consumer journey if the consumer isn’t consciously in control of the journey? My rational tools weren’t working, because we aren’t the rational people we’d like to think we are. Kai Wright says it best: “We aren’t thinking beings who feel, we are feeling beings who think.”

I was about to discover how pain can help prove a brand’s position, and its potential.

When Bad Begets Good

It happened right as The Martin Agency geared up to pitch an automotive industry brand. As always, I was looking into the consumer journey. There is SO much data in the automotive journey (more than you could ever distill into a digestible document—believe me, I’ve tried).

Faced with this massive mountain of meh, I decided to do something different. Inspired by the empathy phase in the design thinking process, I took the auto journey, stripped out every “good” data point and looked only at the “bad” ones. Out went the touchpoints, channels and devices—in went negative consumer feedback, barriers, exits, heated ethnographies, confusion, anger and fear.

The result was fantastic. While most journeys uncover context, this one uncovered tension. Not the big tension we call an enemy, but dozens of smaller, real tensions that make up that enemy. For example, the dating scene is an overwhelming enemy for some teen guys. They have daily encounters with tensions that put ruffles in romance: jokes getting lost in text interpretation, constant second-guessing and failure fatigue from all that swiping and being swiped. Tensions are real issues, real problems and real opportunities for brands to step in and take action.

Meet The Map

Boom. I had created the first version of what we now call the Tension Map, which does much more than a traditional journey could. Instead of creating phases (so communications can address generalized consumer mindsets), a Tension Map looks at the motivators behind a mindset and seeks to find “the why” driving a specific behavior. The goal of a journey is to pinpoint context and create breakthrough with relevance. The goal of a Tension Map, however, is to identify conflict and create resonance by alleviating or eradicating tension with creativity. While a journey wants to be prescriptive, a Tension Map wants to be provocative.

More anthropology than analytics, the output was opportunities for brands to take action across various components of culture. By opening the aperture to beliefs, artifacts, rituals and language—Martin teams were now set up to build what Marcus Collins dubs “cultural contagions.” The creative answering briefs built from a Tension Map didn’t just generate momentary breakthrough, it achieved resonance. Actions and ideas that resonate go beyond awareness and even virality—they get adopted, they get shared and they become behavior.

Aim For Cultural Utility

A lot of brands are riding a slippery slope of false purpose in an effort to gain consumer trust. If the powder keg representing 2020 has taught us anything, it's that empty goodwill doesn’t make brands beloved in the eyes of consumers.

Here’s the hard truth: If your brand wasn’t built on purpose, you can’t just pick the latest hot headline and jump from bandwagon to bandwagon. Creating a purpose-driven brand requires a level of time and investment that can be a tough commitment for some brands. What brands can do is start with focused actions that solve tension for their consumers.

According to those behavioral scientists I mentioned earlier—the real building blocks to resonance are social currency, emotional connectivity, utility and storytelling. Combine some of those elements to solve a real tension, bring it all to life for a large group of people. The result? Making more than just ads. I like to call it cultural utility (if utility is something that a person finds useful, cultural utility is something a community finds useful). It’s something ownable and sharable that people use to feel connected to something bigger than themselves. With the Tension Map as a foundation, we found a repeatable way to uncover opportunities for our brands to create cultural utility. Fueling creative solutions proving brand positioning while also creating waves of social actions that collectively impact, shape and even change culture.

So, Tension Mapping can make dating a bit easier for those confused teen guys. It can help CarMax bring humanity into the soulless world of car buying by treating dealership stickers less like forced logos on cars and more like bumper stickers people display with pride. When COVID-19 does its best to shut down local culture, DoorDash can support local flavors and help keep restaurants open for business.

Speaking Of COVID: We’ve Got A Map For That

Every 2020 marketing forecast went out the window in this pandemic. And we at Martin got tired of seeing report after report come out, littered with generalized insights that wouldn’t help any marketer survive this moment in time, let alone create work worthy of inspiring trust in a country full of people looking for leadership.

Enter: the COVID Tension Map, our most ambitious yet. Interactive, automated and dynamically updated—this map is supported with more cultural context than we’ve previously been able to plot. It’s helped Martin’s clients get to better work faster in a time when most in the industry felt paralyzed. Most importantly, it feels alive in a human way that standard consumer journeys lack.

In short, it was worth secretly quitting my job over.

We want to hear and see from you, too. If you’re itching to know something or have a question or comment we can start a dialogue on—email: katie.walley-wiegert@martinagency.com.