📂 Problem-solving mental models for marketing

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Having good, strong problem-solving skills can make a huge difference in your career.

Problems are at the center of what most people do at work every day.

Whether you're solving a problem for a customer, for yourself or a team member (internal or external), supporting those who are solving problems, or discovering new problems to solve in your business, the problems you face will come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.

Each of these mental models will help you:

• Defining the problem.
• Generate potential solutions.
• Evaluate potential solutions.
• Implement solutions.

The more successful you can be at solving problems — better, faster, cheaper — the more successful you will be overall.

Here are a couple mental models you can use to be a better problem-solver:

Jobs to be done

Personas are often defined by attributes that have nothing to do with causality. For example, someone’s age, sex, race, and weekend habits doesn’t explain why they ate a Snickers bar.

These kind of demographic or firmographic attributes should be used to find them and understand them, but it won't tell you much about their behavior, desires, and fears.

Instead, personas should define the different "jobs" someone would use the product or service for.

So how do you build these personas focused on what customers hire your product for?

The best way is through a specific interview style that hone in on the emotional triggers around a particular point in time that led to a person “hiring” or “firing” a product.

There are four forces that determine when and if someone hires a new product or if they stick with the status quo:

• The push of what's currently happening
• The pull of the new solution
• The anxiety of what could happen
• The attachment to what you currently have

Think of each one of these forces as levers you can pull to pull customers toward your product and push customers away from competitors.

Inversion

Inversion is the practice of looking at things both forward and backwards.

No talk about mental models would be complete without a reference to stoicism.

The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst-case scenario ahead of time, they could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them.

While most people were focused on how they could achieve success, the Stoics also considered how they would manage failure. What would things look like if everything went wrong tomorrow? And what does this tell us about how we should prepare today?

For example, they'd imagine what it would be like to lose their job and become homeless or to suffer an injury and become paralyzed or to have their reputation ruined and lose their status in society.

Here are some useful questions you can ask to help you do better marketing:

• What would prevent a customer from taking advantage of a special offer?
• Why would someone choose a competitor over us?
• What would prevent us from reaching our revenue goal this year?
• If our product launch were to flop, what might be the causes? How can we prevent these things from being factors?

You can see how, already, these mental models can help you find clarity in whatever you're working on to be able to do your best work.

—Corey

p.s. over the holidays I created a short course on How To Beat Your Friends At Poker just for fun. Would love for you to check it out!

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