creative commons: http://flickr.com/photos/ogil

Yesterday I noticed a lot of interest in and chatter about the article in the London Telegraph identifying the Greatest 101 Questions of All Time which will be featured in the March issue of BBC Focus magazine. This on the heels of David Armano’s excellent post, Questions About Questions. In it, he does a wonderful job of explaining the importance of asking the right question for what you are trying to discover.

I know I’m missing a whole host of resources here, but these two current articles got me thinking.

As strategic marketers, account planners and just a generally curious lot, we really should be some of the best questioners around.

Why can’t we put something together that would be of value to everyone involved and develop a list of the Greatest Planning Questions of All Time?

No need to give away any shop secrets, but what inquiries have you made that really got to the heart of the matter at hand? Are there standbys that you turn to to get a group talking? Did someone else come up with the question that caused you to catch your breath?

Each focus group, customer interview or client planning session will be different. There’s no way to capture the context and subtlety of specific projects. Rather, this exercise might be most powerful if kept to broad conversation starters.

Add. Subtract. Pan me as a hack. Whatever you’d like.

The comment floor is open.

I’ll start:

• If your company was a celebrity, living or dead, who would it be and why?
• If your company was an animal, which one would it be and why? (trying to get the cliches out of the way early…I promise not to go to “tree”)
• Tell me about the last time a company truly surprised you.
• What is the one thing you won’t compromise?
• What is your favorite word? (I’m starting to feel like James Lipton)
• If you were queen/king for the day, and could change one thing about (brand), what would it be and why?
• Where do you do your most productive thinking?

“[These] rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.”

Couzin and his colleagues tested their theories of chemical trails and behavioral “norms” using mathematical and computer models. They discovered that among these , and other swarms (birds, fish, locusts), each individual has to regularly choose between its desire to move in a particular direction or to follow the group path. A small number of leaders can turn the swarm by changing the input and that entices the rest of the group to “spontaneously come to a consensus and move in the direction chosen by the majority.”

Brainless animals.

If only it weren’t being found to occur in our species as well. Couzin has found in recent experiments that humans make eerily similar unconscious swarming decisions — influenced by a small group of leaders, we tend to follow a path because of popularity.

Is that why The Blair Witch Project was successful? Does that explain The Tipping Point with empirical proof?

Seems to me to have a great deal of implication on behavior when it comes to marketing. That’s also why I subscribe to the opinion that we should be helping our clients to be noticed for the right reasons with a small, influential audience. I think it was Seth Godin who said we should be creating marketing that is remark-able.

Getting noticed for energy and excitement will capture the attention of the leaders and the swarm will soon follow.