Putting Descartes Before The Horse

Think Feel Do is one of the common or garden frameworks that you’ll encounter often as a strategist. There’s much to like about it; It’s extremely simple, it’s familiar to virtually everyone, it’s action orientated, it’s got room for emotion, and it has the coveted ‘3 things’ rhetorical factor.

Personally though, I feel that there's a bit too much hubris to a Think Feel Do.

Dictating what somebody thinks, feels, and does… It's a bit imposing, especially considering that most advertising is an interruption that happens when people are doing something else that they actually want to be doing.

Say I’m watching Murder She Wrote on the ad-supported Hulu thingo and then Chevrolet bursts onto my screen and shouts “Know that the Chevrolet Silverado has OnStar SuperCruise. Feel energized in your adventures. Visit a Dealership”.

I really want to be watching Angela Lansbury solve crimes, the commercial breaks are abruptly placed interruptions, I haven’t even got a driving license, and then there's the audio compression that somehow smashes the unwanted ad deeper into my reluctant brain.

I fully understand that seeing advertising is the faustian pact I made when I swiped my sister-in-law’s non-premium Hulu login, but it’s all a bit much.

As I said, there is a lot to like about a Think Feel Do, and I don’t blame the framework here so much as I blame 17th Century French philosopher René Descartes.

Descartes, bless him, felt his own existence was a certainty because of his capacity to think. For old René the very ability to doubt his existence was proof of it. I’m not trying to be a dollar store Kierkegaard here and dunk on the Cogito Ergo Sum stuff, it just makes a convenient start point for my bone of contention with Think Feel Do, what I’m calling ‘Putting Descartes Before the Horse’.

Descartes, whether intentionally or not, gives a massive amount of primacy to Thinking. Ever since he ‘thought therefore he am’d’, rationalism has become really embedded in how we as human beings understand the world and ourselves in it.

Sure, I like planes that fly and medicine that works - rational thought has its perks.

But if you have a rudimentary handle on the neuroscientific study of free will - which as a strategist you really should (though creatives get a pass here) - then you’ll be aware of the fact that action actually precedes thought.

We start doing things before we are aware we are doing things - or to put it another way - your conscious mind isn’t really the one in control of what you do. It’s much more like a PR department that rationalizes and makes sense of the actions you take.

So whilst it’s comforting to believe that the conscious thinking mind is the one in the driver's seat, it’s not really true - and when it comes to advertising, a thinking-first approach doesn’t lead to effective work.

The reality is that when people see an ad, they’re not sitting in a quiet room waiting to be enlightened. They’re doing something else. They’re watching a show, scrolling through Instagram, or pushing through on the treadmill half-listening to a podcast.

That’s the reality we’re interrupting, so we should start by understanding what people are actually doing when we show up and interrupt it.

Instead of kicking things off by trying to make people think, why not flip it? Let’s start with what they’re doing. If they’re watching something entertaining, maybe we should be entertaining too. If they’re on Instagram, we should feel like we belong in that endless scroll. If they’re lost in a podcast, we should slip in seamlessly, not like we just crashed the party.

Then we can start shaping a feeling. Emotions are how the brain encodes information as worth remembering. Before people will do anything, we need to spark curiosity, excitement, or we might even borrow from Murder She Wrote and evoke a little intrigue. That emotional hit is what gets them to pause, even for a millisecond, and actually notice us.

Only after that can we bring in the rational bit - what we want them to think. Whether it’s the benefits of a product or a reason to believe, that has to come last, once we’ve already met them where they are and made them feel something.

So let’s ditch the Think Feel Do, and adopt a bit more of a Do Feel Think.

Start by asking What are our audience doing? Then we can work out What feeling will get them to notice and remember us? After that we can do the easy bit; What do we want them to think?