NORTHERN PLANNER

When is the last time the advice you gave a client turned our perfectly in the end? Seriously.

Of course, if you're in the shifting brand health scores business, I guess you might answer pretty recent and very frequently. But about the job we are supposed to be doing? Transforming business?

We're very sure of ourselves most of the time, I've seen many cases when agency folks berate clients who 'just don't get it'. Sometimes that's genuine belief in some great thinking or work, sometimes it's clients not buying into the usual questionable evidence from the industry.

Like the IPA Databank taken as the be all and end all, when the research base is tiny next to all the campaigns that really happen…and fail or. For example, would you put your own money on outspending equivalent market share, with supposed guarantee it will pay back? Based on evidence from a pool of case studies that the authors strongly believed worked. What about the massive budgets on campaigns that didn't?

I think the Byron Sharpe stuff is fantastic, but a brand I work on has grown 10% this year because current buyers are purchasing a lot more frequently. Penetration is not always the only game in town. We've built penetration with an NPD launch it's true, but the volume and value are dwarfed by people buying the core product more. Guidelines are great, but many 'iron laws' are a lot more bendy than we think.

Just as  someone I know wrote an awards paper recently where they made the data look like loyalty had built growth, when in this case it was recruiting new buyers, because 'disrupting' conventional wisdom always plays well with judges.

Which brings me to my left leg.

Shaven, as is normal for cycling types, but with a persistent niggle in the hamstring and sometimes knee that is only just going away after six months. I've done some decent miles and put some okay power down, but lost a big training block overall.

I have also gone through three physios. Each an expert, each totally confident in their expertise. After years of hard sports stuff, I know my way around the human body, but still desperately wanting a problem solved and totally at the mercy of 'experts' is a sobering experience for someone who earns a living giving advice to people.

And each physio gave different advice. The first made it worse. The second made no difference, while on correct diagnosis of the core issue, the third has cracked it (thinking about brand stuff, the first two identified symptoms, not the core driving problem, sound familiar!!!???).

It's like that being a client. Pounded by confident advice by experts with no room for being wrong, being admitting you don't know it all shows weakness and in our macho culture where loudmouths tend to do best, this isn't allowed.

In a pitch, you'll get three agencies with three different solutions, all totally sure they're right. You'll even get 'partner agencies' arguing in front of the client.

Advertising and stuff is not an exact science. Science isn't an exact science either, not just physios, the best physics minds in the world can't agree what the fundamental basis of reality is. In fact, no one knows why you get a headache.

Look, I bet you're good. I bet you're smart and rigorous and all the rest of it. But from now on, when I'm advising clients using my so called 'expertise' I'll be remembering how it felt to desperately want my physio to help me and how crushed I felt when the advice was so wrong.

And angry.

We've all been to the doctors, we know how it feels to be patronised by someone with knowledge in a field we haven't.

Or even worse if you've moved house in the UK and had to pay a solicitor wads of cash for making your life harder, you'll know what it feels like being helpless in the hands of a charlatan.

The more we remember how that feels, the better we'll all be.

(of course, there are clients who self diagnose and just order the agency to apply the medicine. That's a very, very different story)