EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS FORM OUR PERSONAL NARRATIVE,

THESE ARE THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES.

We seek out others and form tribes who share a similar narrative, further confirming our core narratives to be true: this is confirmation bias. To add to the complexity, most narratives often contain contrasting beliefs, such as a pro-life carnivore or a pro-choice vegan.

By making the effort to understand individual and group narratives, you can begin to unearth the emotion that drives decision making. This is our job as marketers. We must dive headfirst into the chaos of human emotions and create experiences that elicit a feeling, giving birth to a new belief that changes consumer behavior.

Creating a brand with a powerful emotional narrative is not a new idea, and as with anything, it’s why and how you do it. The dominant agency methodology is still a ridged straight line. It’s a waterfall approach to gathering consumer insight, developing a brand positioning, creating / producing messages, and developing distribution plans through media platforms. This has not changed for two reasons, CERTAINTY, and FEES.

HUMANS HAVE A BASE LEVEL NEED FOR CERTAINTY

And for the most part this need serves us well, driving to create actions and technology that help us predict and prepare for future events. Fear, one of our most powerful emotions, can increase our need for certainty to paralyzing levels. If your company has an unhealthy balance of fear, the need for certainty will show up in unnecessarily complex organizational structures, jargon, corporate policies, management and employee behavior, workflow processes and over-investments in technology and data. Agencies respond to their clients’ need for certainty by mirroring the same structures, processes, and investments. These systems require talented staff and siloed departments that match the hierarchal structures of their client’s. This leaves agency strategy, media, account, and creative tribes to develop their own set of misaligned beliefs, supporting narratives and incentives. It is a rare event for an agency or client to go back and challenge their own thinking after work has been approved along the department assembly line. Pushing the stop button on the line is only for emergencies and doing so would signal uncertainty. More importantly, invested time would be lost and that affects profit. This brings us to fees. Agency fees have been historically tied to headcount and hours, along with any additional technology investments, making it very expensive and profitable to deliver certainty. This reinforces the universal time equals quality and quality is expensive narrative. Half of this is true, quality should cost more because quality work is more effective. Charging for time spent on the job is great for procurement managers but it is destroying creative effectiveness. What has been clear for both clients and agencies over the past decade is that the waterfall process of certainty culture is not sustainable.

FOR THE PAST 20 YEARS WE HAVE PRACTICED THE ART OF UNCERTAINTY

Fort Franklin has always operated under a more fluid, continuously iterative model of thinkers and makers growing and learning, harnessing the power of emotional data to create work that forms a new belief. We continue to embrace uncertainty, not only though our client work, but through our own business creation and transformation. Living by example, Fort Franklin sold the agency (FF 1.0) to a local Boston agency in 2010, then started another company under a new name (Tauntr.com / Relevant24) and sold that company to the Publicis Groupe in 2014. Fort Franklin 3.0 re-formed in late 2019 and has rapidly transformed to a 100% remote company with a four day work week, staying true to what it means to be agile. It’s unfortunate that the term agile marketing is often misused in the context of being nimble, quick, and cheap. Being an agile marketer is about having a growth mindset, it’s about never standing still, active listening, empathy, openness, and action. When you really think about it, great strategic and creative thinkers are the most agile people on the planet, they constantly challenge the status quo and relentlessly strive to make their work better. Simply put, cultures driven by fear and friction no longer serve our industry or the world for that matter, it’s time for all of us to become agile and of that we are certain.

OUR NAME

FORTS are daring frontier outposts, set up in the middle of hostile territory to defend a strategic position.

Our English word fort derives from Latin fortis means strong, mighty, or brave.

Benjamin FRANKLIN embodies our definition of a true agile person. Journalist, musician, politician, scientist, humorist, inventor, civic leader, printer, writer, publisher, entrepreneur, founding father, and philosopher, he approached life with a growth mindset. Relentlessly iterative and constantly challenging his beliefs, learning from his own failures, hypocrisy, and flaws to create and champion new behaviors for himself and society. From having two years of formal education to founding the University of Pennsylvania. From being a British loyalist to becoming the architect of the world's first democracy. From having house servant slaves to leading America’s Abolitionist movement and becoming the first person to petition Congress to bring slavery to an end, keeping up this fight until his death. He never accepted life as it was, and at times risked his own, to help us realize what it could be.

MANAGEMENT TEAM