Menu
Close
.svg)
The spark of inspiration doesn’t always arrive during a brainstorming session or a strategy meeting. Sometimes, it shows up in the breakfast room, during a family game night on a humid evening early in July.
Our daughter was home from college, and she’d brought with her a game called Ransom Notes. We’d never played it before, and truthfully, I didn’t expect much given the modest nondescript box.
But within minutes, we were howling with laughter—and something else happened too. Somewhere between piecing together the words in a warning sign for people entering an underwater cave; to composing a Facebook message to a high school crush, I found myself thinking: This could actually work in health care marketing research.
Ransom Notes started as a crowdsourced game on Kickstarter, launched by a small team that wanted to reimagine the classic magnetic poetry concept through the lens of party games. Each player gets a mini metal tray and a pile of magnets with random words. A card is drawn with an absurd or offbeat prompt—“What are some tips for keeping your food safe from bears?” or “Summarize the existence of men”—and you’re given 90 seconds to build a response using only the words you’ve been dealt.
What makes the game unexpectedly rich is the tension between constraint and expression. You’re working with randomness, but you’re still reaching for meaning. The word magnets are a mix of the mundane and the bizarre: “cringe,” “eternal,” “bro,” “glitter,” "yo," “explode,” “rizz.” (I had to ask my daughter to define several of the words, like rizz.) And yet, somehow, the responses often land in a sweet spot—part hilarity, part accidental poetry.
A few of mine felt like they could’ve been fragments from an e.e. cummings poem. Or maybe a social media meltdown.
In healthcare marketing research—whether in pharma, medtech, or diagnostics—we're constantly striving to uncover deeper, more authentic insights. Yet all too often, we find ourselves relying on familiar qualitative frameworks: structured interview questions, classic focus group techniques, even projective exercises that—while effective—can begin to feel formulaic. "If you had to compare this brand to a famous actor, etc."
These methods can sometimes stifle spontaneity, especially in remote settings where respondent attention is fractured by email inboxes, text notifications, and EMR prompts. The result? Conversations that check the boxes, but don't always get beneath the surface.
So what if we borrowed a little from Ransom Notes?
Imagine inviting a physician, nurse, or patient to participate in a similar exercise. You provide a curated set of words (some familiar, some unexpected), a prompt tailored to the study objectives—“Describe your first reaction to hearing this diagnosis,” or “Craft a message introducing this new treatment”—and give them a few minutes to piece something together.
Then, you ask the most important question: Why those words? And furthermore: "How were you feeling as you were struggling to make sense of them in 90 seconds?"
This taps directly into something well-documented in behavioral psychology: the power of constraints to free up creativity. When people have too many options, they freeze or tune out. When given a few playful, bounded inputs, they often generate richer, more emotionally resonant output. There’s also a cognitive bias at work—what we reach for first, what “feels right” under time pressure, is often more authentic than a well-reasoned answer developed over several minutes. System 1 thinking in action.
This approach also surfaces what I (and advertising copywriters) like to call “power words.” The words respondents grab instinctively tell us a lot—about tone, affect, relevance, even cultural resonance. It’s a more behaviorally honest and authentic way of getting at what messaging might stick, or what emotional texture a brand could carry.
I’m not suggesting we replace our tried and true qualitative methods with refrigerator magnet poetry. But I do think there’s something here. A quick, word-based exercise like this can serve as a warm-up, a message test, or even an ideation tool. It breaks the ice. It gets people laughing. But it also helps them say something real, fast.
That night, over a kitchen table scattered with magnets, I was reminded that insight doesn’t always come from a well-crafted, thoroughly written discussion guide. Sometimes, it starts with a wacky prompt and a pile of random words—and a willingness to listen a little differently.
I'd love to hear how others are incorporating play, constraint, or creative structure into research. And if you haven’t tried Ransom Notes yet—add it to your weekend plans. Be prepared to discover both outrageous laughter and surprising depth.
