HANES: BEFORE THE DAY WAS OVER
The Situation
A major apparel brand had a year’s worth of marketing budget and too many places to spend it. Multiple channels, multiple agency partners, and a room full of capable people who had been working the account long enough to have strong opinions about what should happen next. I was brought in ten days before a multi-day senior leadership workshop. Nobody in the room had worked with me before.
What Was Actual Broken
The room was being asked to decide. That sounds straightforward until you understand what deciding looks like when a group of senior marketers and agency leads sit down together without a shared picture of what they are actually deciding about. What happens is not a decision. What happens is a negotiation between competing priorities dressed up as a strategy conversation. The room was not broken because the people were wrong. It was broken because nobody had shown the room what the actual customer experience looked like before asking it to fix anything.
The Turning Point
I opened with a short framing of the customer groups and what the room was trying to accomplish for them. Not as conclusions. As starting points the room could confirm, challenge, or expand. Once there was agreement on who we were talking about and what those people were trying to do, the next move was mapping how those customers actually moved through the world toward a Hanes purchase. I pre-mapped the journey to speed up the session, but the map was not an answer. It was a prompt. The room tore it apart, expanded it, and made it accurate.
Then came the part most workshops skip. Before anyone talked about solutions, we mapped the friction points on the journey. Not to solve them yet. To name what type of friction each one was and whether the brand could control it, message to it, or only observe it. Once every friction point was named and visible, the room started seeing which problems it had been trying to solve with the wrong tools and which real opportunities it had been ignoring entirely.
Solutions came from the room, not from a recommendation deck. The room generated them against a map it had built together. The vote at the end was not a formality. It was a prioritization based on a shared picture that everyone in the room had a hand in creating. People got two votes each, weighted by seniority where the client chose that, applied only to things they believed could actually move
What Changed
The room left with a prioritized list of real solutions mapped against a real user journey. Not a consultant’s opinion about what Hanes should do. A picture the room drew of itself and a ranked set of answers the room produced from that picture. I then built a detailed scope from that knowledge because I had been inside every part of the conversation and understood what the work actually required.
The client extended the engagement before the first day was over.
Frank’s Take
Most facilitated workshops ask people to describe a problem and then brainstorm solutions. The limitation is that people in a room will tell you what sounds right, not what is actually happening. They talk about process because talking about process feels productive and keeps everyone comfortable. The journey map changes that dynamic because the map does not care about anyone’s comfort. Once friction points are visible on a picture the whole room built together, the conversation stops being about what we think and starts being about what we see. That is when a room becomes capable of making a real decision.