The problem
Nestlé's chocolate drink brand, Chuckie, was invisible. Not failing. Invisible, which is worse. I was an art director at McCann Worldgroup at the time, running 360-degree campaigns for Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Globe Telecom when Nestlé's packaging problem landed on the account. I went to the supermarket and walked the chocolate drinks aisle like an ordinary shopper, and I couldn't tell one pack from another. Just a wall of brown, competitor after competitor, Chuckie camouflaged somewhere in the middle of it.
Nobody at Nestlé handed me a real creative brief. What I got was "do something to increase sales." I had to find the actual problem before I could fix anything.
What I found
The whole category had converged on brown. Every brand, no exceptions. Categories do this all the time, nobody wants to be first to break from what's already working for everyone else, so the whole shelf ends up looking the same. Which meant a color was sitting there unclaimed. Nobody owned one.
The pitch nobody wanted to hear
I told Nestlé to go the opposite direction. Not tweak the brown, abandon it. Predominantly yellow, loud enough to be the one thing on the shelf that doesn't look like everything around it.
The room didn't love it. Brown felt safe. Yellow felt like the kind of call that gets someone fired if it flops. I held the position anyway and got the sign-off, mostly by showing them exactly which shelf they'd be standing next to and what they'd actually look like in it.
What happened
The redesign took the shelf. Chuckie went from disappearing into the category to owning the only color nobody else had touched. It worked well enough that competitors started copying the yellow, and Nestlé issued cease-and-desist letters to make them stop. The packaging is still running today, two decades later, unchanged on the one decision that mattered.
This is the case that taught me the difference between a safe answer and a right one.
Everyone in that room had a reason to say no. I had one reason to say yes, I'd actually looked at the shelf, and they hadn't. That's still how I work. Read the real situation before anyone else bothers to, then hold the position when the room gets nervous.