NORTHERN PLANNER

Read the usual book and guidelines and you'll get frameworks, process and the myth that if you do it this way, it will all be easy.

No one tells you HOW to work, how to get your mind in a place where answers come, that leap of imagination or connection.

And don't let anyone tell you that strategy isn't about connection or conjuring something out of thin air, because it is.

It's not just about issue, then market, then consumer, (but put culture and real life in here and you're already ahead) then brand then BINGO, core thought. 

It's about seeing something in all that no one else does. Sometimes a more creative act than the creatives. 

To make it harder, there is less and less time to do it.

You'll find your own way to do this, but here is what I do from time to time, apart from starting in a totally different way. 

First, read ALL the reference you can, try the product, talk to people while they buy it, use it. Do it quick, exhaust yourself.

Then immediately start writing a creative brief.

Allow no distractions, do not finish until you've done. 

Just start filling out the box you can answer first, then move onto the next.

Keep going.

You'll soon have a bad brief with little bits of gold, that doesn't hang together.  

Keep going, resolve the contradictions and disconnections until every box is making the same point, albeit in slightly different ways.

Once it makes sense, go back over each box, one by one, until what you write sings.

In other words, get in the Flow.

If you really push yourself, the subconscious that has been taking on board all this information will work for you. The strategy will emerge on the page as you turn crap into gold.

Once you have a page you would want to work on, stop.

Leave it a few hours, recover. Then do one more edit. Nine times out of ten, you'll have a great strategy.

Because freedom limits you. The act of having to put things into limited space and boxes boosts the creative mind.

It's why poetry and Haikus have strict rules and guideline, yet produce some of the most beautiful things human kind has ever produced.

Now all you have to do is find the further evidence you need for what you've written.

Post rationalisaton isn't a crime. Its an art.