I once worked with enterprise consultants from Salesforce and a large client to see how we could improve strategy sessions for their customers. One gap in our industry right now is that companies often have the budget, resources, and sometimes tools but often lack the strategy to kick off an appropriate execution plan.
Rose Bud Thorn
One application they take on the road to virtually every customer is a design thinking activity called Rose, Bud, Thorn. The exercise’s simplicity and the identified themes make it a powerful methodology for pinpointing gaps in marketing efforts.
Rose, Bud, Thorn is a reflective exercise that offers unique advantages within the broader spectrum of design thinking activities. Here’s how it differs and why it can be particularly beneficial: Rose, Bud, Thorn is a simple yet effective method for gathering feedback and insights. In this exercise, participants identify three types of elements:
- Rose: Something positive or successful
- Bud: An area with potential for growth or improvement
- Thorn: A challenge or pain point
What sets Rose, Bud, Thorn apart is its balanced approach to feedback. Unlike some design thinking activities that may focus primarily on problem-solving, this exercise encourages participants to consider both positive and negative aspects and opportunities for growth. The advantages of Rose, Bud, Thorn include:
- Accessibility: It’s easy to understand and implement, making it suitable for diverse teams and skill levels.
- Holistic perspective: By considering positives, negatives, and potential, it provides a more comprehensive view of a situation or product.
- Positivity bias: Starting with Rose helps create a positive mindset, potentially leading to more constructive discussions.
- Future-oriented: The Bud component encourages forward-thinking and identifies opportunities that might be overlooked in problem-focused exercises.
- Brevity: It’s a quick exercise that can yield valuable insights quickly, making it ideal for time-constrained environments.
- Versatility: It can be applied to various contexts, from product development to team dynamics and personal growth.
While Rose, Bud, Thorn is a valuable exercise, it’s important to note that it’s most effective when used with other design thinking methods. It excels at providing a snapshot of current perceptions and future possibilities but may need to be supplemented with more in-depth analysis for complex problem-solving.
In marketing contexts, Rose, Bud, Thorn can be particularly useful for quickly assessing campaign performance, identifying areas for brand growth, or gathering initial feedback on new product concepts. Its balanced approach can help marketers maintain perspective and identify opportunities amidst challenges.
What You Need
- Sharpies
- Red, blue, and green sticky notes
- Plenty of wall or whiteboard space
- A facilitator to keep things on track
- 2 to 4 key people that understand the process
Examples for Application
Perhaps you will implement a new marketing technology to develop automated customer journeys. The project may come to a screaming halt as you don’t know where to start your planning. This is where Rose, Bud, Thorn can come in handy.
- Rose: What’s Working? Begin by writing down what’s working with the implementation. Perhaps the training has been excellent, or the platform is easy to use. Maybe you’ve got great resources on your team or through a third party to assist. It could be anything—write down what’s working.
- Bud: What are the Opportunities? Some opportunities will rise as you pour through your people, process, and platform. Perhaps the platform offers social, ad, or text messaging capabilities that could help you better target your prospects multi-channel. Perhaps some future integrations are available to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI). It could be anything!
- Thorn: What’s Broken? As you analyze your project, you may identify things that are missing, frustrating, or that are failing. Perhaps it’s the timeline, or you don’t have good enough data to make some decisions on.Â
If you spend 30 to 45 minutes empowering your team to post notes and think of every possible rose, bud, or thorn, you may be left with quite a collection of sticky notes everywhere. By getting your thoughts out on color-coded notes and organizing them, you’ll see some themes emerge that you didn’t quite see before.
Time to Cluster
The next step is to cluster the notes, which is called affinity mapping. Utilize categorization to move the notes and organize them from Rose, Bud, Thorn to actual processes. In the case of your marketing efforts, you may wish to have several columns:
Discovery
This column focuses on the research and data gathering phase of marketing planning. It’s about understanding the market, audience, and competitive landscape.
Rose
Successful research methods or valuable insights gained
Bud
Potential new data sources or research techniques to explore
Thorn
Challenges in data collection or gaps in current market understanding
Alignment
This column represents the core marketing effort, including the overall approach, messaging, and channel selection.
Rose
Effective strategies that have yielded positive results
Bud
Emerging trends or untapped opportunities in marketing strategy
Thorn
Areas where the current strategy is falling short or facing obstacles
Implementation
This column addresses the tools, resources, and processes needed to build and launch the marketing initiative.
Rose
Efficient tools or processes that have streamlined implementation
Bud
Potential new technologies or methodologies to enhance implementation
Thorn
Resource constraints or bottlenecks in the implementation process
Execution
This column focuses on the actual deployment of the marketing initiative, including resource allocation, goal-setting, and measurement.
Rose
Successful campaigns or metrics that have exceeded expectations
Bud
Promising new channels or tactics that could be leveraged
Thorn
Underperforming aspects of execution or measurement challenges
Optimization
This column represents the ongoing improvement of the marketing initiative, both in real-time and for future iterations.
Rose
Successful optimization techniques or notable improvements
Bud
Potential new optimization strategies or tools to explore
Thorn
Persistent issues that have resisted optimization efforts
When aligning post-its in each column, encourage participants to think holistically about each stage of the marketing process. This structured approach allows teams to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities at each stage of the marketing process. It provides a comprehensive view of the entire marketing lifecycle, from initial research to ongoing optimization.
By organizing Rose, Bud, Thorn notes in this way, marketers can more easily spot patterns, identify where different stages of the process may be affecting each other, and develop targeted strategies for improvement. This method combines the balanced perspective of Rose, Bud, Thorn with a structured view of the marketing process, providing a powerful tool for reflection and planning.
As you move your notes to these categories, you’ll see some great themes materialize. Perhaps you’ll even see one that is more green, helping you see where the roadblock is so that you can determine how to overcome it successfully.
Design Thinking
This is just a simple exercise that’s utilized in design thinking. Design thinking is a human-centered, iterative problem-solving approach that has gained significant traction in various industries, including marketing. Its methodology encourages innovative thinking and focuses on understanding user needs to develop effective solutions. Let’s expand on the five stages of design thinking and how they apply to marketing:
- Empathize: The empathize stage involves deeply understanding your target audience. Marketers engage in various activities to gather insights into their audience’s needs, pain points, behaviors, and motivations. This can include conducting customer interviews, distributing surveys, listening to social media, analyzing analytics data, and performing observational research. The goal is to set aside assumptions and connect with the audience’s perspective, creating a solid foundation for developing effective marketing strategies.
- Define: The define stage involves synthesizing the information gathered during the empathize phase to articulate the problem or challenge clearly. Use this stage to identify specific audience segments, pinpoint key messaging opportunities, define campaign objectives, and clarify brand positioning. This process creates a clear, actionable problem statement to guide subsequent marketing efforts, ensuring that strategies are focused and aligned with audience needs.
- Ideate: This is where creativity comes into play. The ideation phase involves generating various ideas to address the defined problem. Marketers might brainstorm campaign concepts, explore different content formats, consider various channel strategies, and develop potential brand narratives. The key is encouraging diverse thinking and avoiding judging ideas too early, allowing innovative and unexpected solutions to emerge.
- Prototype: In this stage, bring ideas to life in a tangible form. This might involve creating mock-ups of advertisements, developing sample content pieces, designing landing page wireframes, or drafting email templates. The goal is to create low-fidelity versions of ideas that can be easily tested and refined. This hands-on approach allows marketers to visualize concepts and identify potential issues before investing significant resources.
- Test: The final stage involves putting prototypes before real users to gather feedback. Marketers might engage in A/B testing different ad creatives, running focus groups on campaign messaging, conducting user testing on website designs, or soft-launching a campaign to a small audience segment. The insights gained from testing feed back into earlier stages, making design thinking an iterative process that continually refines and improves marketing strategies based on real-world feedback.
I’d encourage you to take a course, watch some videos, or buy a Design Thinking book. It’s transforming the way businesses function. If you have any recommendations, please leave them in the comments!
