NORTHERN PLANNER

Imagine someone organised the biggest planning conference ever. Big enough for every planner from the four corners of the Earth to attend. Let's dwell on that for a second- all those converse trainers, moleskins and furrowed brows. Imagine the chaos with no suits to organise it.

Ok, good. Now pretend the conference was utterly destroyed in an earthquake. Suddenly the world is devoid of planners. How would everyone manage?

I bet you most agencies wouldn't grind to a halt. Account management would keep things moving, creatives would still have the ideas, media would still get bought. Market research would still get done to make sure campaigns were not exercises in guessing. Some might even venture that things happened a lot quicker without all the prevarication.

So what is the point of planning then?

Let's roll back to the 1960's. Marketing departments were overflowing with all sorts of data about consumers, while agencies had no one who could make any sense of it.

Meanwhile, they had heated debates about creative ideas with no input from the people that mattered, consumers. Research got in the way of ideas if it was used at all.

So planners were invented to bridge the gap between research data and creativity – use research to create more powerful creative ideas.

Not the voice of the consumer – that's too passive. Planners are not simply market researchers, they use that raw material for the basis of building ideas – new stuff, not just what research tells you to do.

All the other stuff: brainstorming, workshop moderating, trend spotting, blog writing, media neutral planning, all that came after. All of it was, and is, valuable, but is extra to what planning came into the world for. The trouble is, it's easy to mistake these bits as the day job as they increasingly take up more and more of your time.

Is that would you would be missed for?

Maybe that's why planners find it so hard to tell other people what they do, we're suffering from an identity crisis. The world has got more complex, there are more ways to go about it and ways to output what you have learned, but in the end, if all the planners disappeared in that imaginary conference, what you would hope people would miss you for would be why we were invented:

To use information about consumers to develop better strategy and creative ideas.

That's it.