Earlier this month, we talked about positioning Article Group as a product marketing agency.

TL; DR: It’s not a straightforward process: We knew that we needed to shift, and found the pandemic economy gave us breathing room to decide which direction we needed to go. Along the way, we asked ourselves a lot of tough questions, and had faith in our answers, following them to the other side.

And … it worked!

So, we got to thinking: 

What if there was an actual series of questions that businesses could ask themselves to kickstart repositioning?

Based on our own journey, we had a bunch of brainstorms to construct these questions. We thought of some good ones; we thought of some really dark ones. And as we were weeding through the winners, our method of inquiry started to resemble the series of self-reflective questions made famous by navel-gazer extraordinaire Marcel Proust. (If you read Vanity Fair, you’re probably familiar.)

Proust holds the official record for the longest novel of all time. And yet he participated in a practice that boiled down his core principles to 35 questions. Take this quiz, Proust suggests, and the other 1.266-odd million words become a nice-to-have.

What would Marcel Proust do, we thought, if he were to structure his questionnaire for modern businesses purposes?

Behold: the Proust Questionnaire for Business.

We can’t guarantee that it will magically fix all of your strategic goals. So why do it? Because finding focus takes time, and carving out time is the first step. It will probably be a fun exercise, nonetheless, and help you jump-start the process.

Fin