NORTHERN PLANNER

Since I’m freeing my reading up for more fiction, it feels like the right time to pick up on something I’ve noticed from the trade press and leave be for awhile. That’s models, theories of how brands work or ‘how we should develop work now’.

Now if you’ve read one or two books on planning and brands, you’ll know what I’ll mean. Most gleefully pelt shiny, fresh new Damascus discoveries at us like the shiniest, freshest thing since bread came sliced. Mostly, they’re thinly disguised new business tools, or re-packaged observations on basic craft, or trends that have become mainstream. They, and you, know who they are. But one or two rise above this and are genuinely useful. Truth Lies and Advertising and Eating the Big Fish are the best ones for me, but Herd and The Brand Innovation Manifesto work for me too. What they tend to have in common is a toolkit to frame your thinking, rather than how to think in the first place.

Overall, there seems to be an agreed evolution of how brands have worked in recent history:

1. The unique selling proposition for a time when products were genuinely different to each other.
2. Consumer insights – magnifying an observatio about a target audience’s relationship with the category/brand/service/product.
3. Disruption – as attention got harder to earn, brands began to wilfully break the rules to stand out.
4. The age of brand insights. Ignore consumer insight, don’t disrupt for the sake of it, as consumers demand authenticity, make a truth about the brand/company/product service as interesting as possible. Target conversations rather than groups.
5. And I would argue that we’re moving into the age of the stunt (Sony, Drench, Bud, Gorilla), where being interesting matters more than being salient (and maybe salience doesn’t matter at all!!

Most books and papers seems to argue for one of these ways of thinking about brands and, therefore, ways of developing strategy. But the problem is, life is just too messy. Sometimes it’s right to dial up the brand culture, sometimes you’ve got a genuine USP and shoulf just get out of the way, sometimes the brand is so big, it just needs to steer to keep it salient or interesting.

But to be honest, good ideas tend to be a pivotal observation that observes all of the above (with a possible exception of USP). You can’t decide the best thing to do without understanding something about your audience, the brand and the competitive context…and I’d add something about the consumer culture around the competitive context.

When you know what the right thing to do right now is, you can decide what element of your brand toolkit to dial up. That’s how it works for me.

I’m not saying that you won’t have found your voice after 7 years or so. You’ll have an act, a way of doing things…..but in the end, be very nervous of models and proprietry process. Ideas tend to emerge, mostly over time, mostly out of meeting rooms.