NORTHERN PLANNER

Righto, first part of keeping my promises on the basics stuff.

This lovely little chart is the planning cycle. You may have seen it before, you may have not, but it’s useful to have a reminder of the basic process.Notice it’s a continuous one. That’s what I both love and hate about this job, your work is quite literally never done.

While it’s continual, it’s useful to think of it as four distinct phases. Depending on your agency culture, client culture, budgets and indeed, the type of planner you want to be, you may use research in all of these, but you need to carry out these in some form in any case. Notice that the creative briefing is by no means the end.

It’s your responsibility to:

1. Define the task – and identify a strategy that will meet that task
2. Ensure the creative ideas that arise from that strategy meet that task
3. Make sure the executions do justice for the idea – will the work do what we want it to do?
4. Evaluate if we have succeeded in our task, and what the next move should be

And that’s pretty much it. Those are the four basic roles. They are not easy, they are not simple, but that’s what they are.

We will cover these in more detail in subsequent posts. But basically, you can see the roles that research will have at each stage.

That’s it. But sometimes it’s good to just begin at the beginning. More detail on each stage to follow….