I believe most brands have the problem-solving order backwards. They start with what they want to say, then look for a person to say it to. I start the other way around — with what a specific group of people actually needs, then work out whether a brand is even capable of providing it.

That obsession with human behavior is where everything begins for me. Not the aspirational version of people — the real one. The version that procrastinates, rationalizes, avoids, and occasionally surprises itself. When I worked on savings products at TBC Bank, I didn't ask "how do we communicate saving?" I asked "why do people abandon savings goals after two weeks?" The answer was behavioral, not financial. So the solution was too. That's the only kind of strategy I find interesting to make.

Creativity comes in at the other end of that process — not as decoration, but as the thing that makes a behavioral truth impossible to ignore. We're all drowning in information. The brands that change habits aren't the loudest ones. They're the ones that found the right truth and then found an unexpected way to show it to you. That's the combination I've been chasing for twelve years, and I still find it genuinely hard, which is probably why I haven't got bored of it yet.