NORTHERN PLANNER

Since I’m off soon, work have got me doing some creative briefing workshops over my last couple of weeks. Hopefully they’ve found it useful. I certainly have since having to teach something makes you think a little harder about how you go about things. And bump across some bad habits you didn’t know you developed. It’s also reinforced a truth about planning to me too.

I see much of this job as a series of connections. Really good strategy tends to make people connect things in a different way, or remind them it’s there. That makes much of the day job about collecting lots of stimulus ready to connect it to something you’ll be working on sometime.But connections matter for the here and now too.

It’s useful to look for overlaps between audience, market, brand and so forth… and it’s unavoidable. The more you talk about tone of voice, the more you end up talking about objectives and propositions too. That’s the secret to thinking about strategy and writing briefs I think. Start writing/thinking about the bit you can do, and soon you find you’re moving on to something else. It starts to do itself.Like the way Jigsaws get easier as you put more pieces together.

I saw this when we were covering objectives in the workshops- soon we were talking the audience as a natural progression. Then when we talked about the audience, suddenly tone and proposition stuff just arrived. And they found that discussing it and bouncing it around made things emerge so much more easily.

What does that mean? Start quickly and improve it as you go along. And the more you talk about it, the better it will get. Things start connecting.