Listen Before You Create
Every creative team wants to make something brilliant. The problem? Most of them start too soon.
They dive straight into brainstorms, mood boards, and mockups, chasing originality before clarity. But as Sarah Schaffer, Founder and CEO of Bond Studios, put it on a recent episode of the Brilliantly Wrong Podcast: great marketing doesn't start with inspiration. It starts with investigation.
"Our job is to listen first, create second. Too many agencies reverse that."
Sarah's background is in journalism, and it shows. Before you write the headline, you have to understand the story. Before you craft the story, you have to understand the people. Marketing works the same way, but teams often skip this step because the creative phase is where the fun lives.
The impulse to build before we understand
There's a pattern in modern marketing: brands and agencies rush to concepts because that's where the energy is. The brainstorm. The mood board. The big idea.
But that excitement often crowds out curiosity.
The result? Decks that sit in drawers. Campaigns that don't convert. Clients who feel like they were never really heard. Skipping the listening phase doesn't save time, it manufactures expensive rework.
The journalistic approach
Schaffer's team doesn't just talk to the CMO. They talk to the people behind the product, including employees who live the brand, customers who feel it. They ask the questions a good journalist would:
Why now?
What's the real problem here?
What are people actually afraid of?
What keeps you up at night?
Those answers shape everything that follows. Messaging hierarchy, tone, visuals. All of it.
"Listening up front saves you from rework later. But more than that, it earns trust. People can see themselves in the final product because they helped shape it."
Why listening is a competitive advantage
Anyone can make noise. Very few can make sense. The brands that win are the ones that genuinely understand their customers, and that starts with a real conversation, not a brief.
Want to go deeper? Listen to the full episode with Sarah Schaffer on the Brilliantly Wrong Podcast.
