NORTHERN PLANNER

Strategy used to be called planning.

Which is probably all the evidence you need that strategy people should never be allowed anywhere near naming.

Still, there was something beautifully simple about account planning. The job was, more or less, to help make the right plan rather than the wrong one.

And part of the reason planning came into being was to protect creativity from research.

Clients started to ask the people their advertising was aimed at what they thought about it. Researchers were duly commissioned. Groups were convened. People sat behind one-way mirrors. Biscuits were provided.

The difficulty was that the people conducting the research often knew relatively little about how advertising actually worked.

Although, to be fair, neither did anybody else. They still don’t including the people who make it.

Planners were supposed to sit somewhere in the middle. Close enough to research to understand real people, but close enough to creativity to understand that asking someone whether they “like” an advert is not necessarily the same thing as understanding whether it will work.

It was a useful skill.

Then somewhere along the way, planners stopped doing very much research.

Perhaps this is why we needed the grander title of strategist.

It sounds considerably more impressive and conveniently disguises the fact that many practitioners have become professional opinion holders.

We read things.

We develop points of view.

We post confidently on LinkedIn.

Sometimes we even put a pyramid in a presentation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having an opinion. Having a good one is an important part of the job.

The problem comes when we forget what it is.

An opinion.

Because the slightly uncomfortable truth is that nobody really knows exactly how advertising works.

There are obviously people who know an enormous amount about it. There are decades of evidence. There are useful models, principles and patterns.

But there is no equation into which you can enter a brand, audience and budget and receive a guaranteed answer.

Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp can disagree about fairly fundamental things. Practitioners have been arguing about how advertising works for as long as advertising has existed.

Paul Feldwick wrote one of the best books on the subject and, massively oversimplified, much of its conclusion is essentially:

It depends.

Which is both reassuring and deeply annoying.

If some of the most experienced people in the industry cannot predict with certainty whether something will work, there is perhaps something slightly odd about asking a group of eight people in a room in Slough to do it for us.

Although possibly they are less confused than the experts.

That particular problem is mostly about creative research.

Research has a much bigger job than deciding whether somebody prefers Script A or Script B.

Its more valuable role is helping us understand the world the work has to live in.

And this is where another problem appears.

People don’t generally spend their days thinking about brands.

They don’t sit around contemplating the emotional role jam plays in their lives.

They don’t discuss the semiotics of household cleaning.

They don’t wonder what their bank “means to them”.

We do.

Which makes asking ordinary people direct questions about these things slightly dangerous.

Ask somebody a question and, especially if you have given them £60 and a sandwich to answer it, they will try their best to give you an answer.

The answer may even sound convincing.

It just might not be true.

Not because people are liars.

Because we are remarkably good at constructing explanations for things we have never previously considered.

Asking somebody how a brand fits into their life can therefore be a bit like asking a fish to explain swimming.

The fish swims perfectly well.

It just doesn’t have a PowerPoint about it.

Which is why some of the best research doesn’t really feel like research at all.

Instead of asking people about brands, ask them about their lives.

Better still, sometimes don’t ask very much.

Listen.

Watch.

Hang around.

Go somewhere real.

Have a conversation rather than an interview.

People reveal extraordinary things when they stop being asked research questions.

You could describe good research as professional voyeurism.

Or perhaps professional nosiness.

Both sound slightly sinister.

But the principle matters.

You are trying to understand life as it is lived rather than life as it is reported in response to Question 17b.

And it is tempting at this point to conclude that research is rubbish.

That would be equally stupid.

The alternative is strategy and creativity completely untethered from reality.

A room full of agency people confidently discussing what “people” think while none of them has actually spoken to one recently.

Research isn’t the problem.

The problem is what we ask it to do.

Research should rarely be asked to provide the answer.

It provides evidence.

Stimulus.

Contradictions.

Possibilities.

Sometimes it destroys an idea.

Sometimes it turns a mediocre idea into a better one.

Occasionally it provides the tiny observation from which an extraordinary idea grows.

In the right hands it is invaluable.

In the wrong hands it is creative kryptonite.

And perhaps the biggest mistake is thinking research is something researchers do.

Creatives should research.

Strategists should research.

Account people should research.

Everyone making something for other human beings should spend as much time as possible around other human beings.

Not necessarily with a discussion guide.

Just paying attention.

I sometimes learn more listening to people talking while they queue to sign in at the swimming pool than I do reading the latest marketing effectiveness report.

Not because reports aren’t useful.

Because the queue is life happening.

People complaining.

Joking.

Negotiating with their children.

Talking about money.

Work.

Dinner.

Parking.

Their aching knee.

The thing their husband has done again.

Tiny fragments of the world our work is supposed to exist within.

The more of that you absorb, the more of it somehow finds its way back into the work.

Research, then, isn’t really a stage in a process.

It is a habit.

Curiosity with its sleeves rolled up.

A willingness to notice.

To ask another question.

Or sometimes to stop asking questions altogether and simply listen.

Perhaps we need another name for people who do this.

Spongers would be quite accurate.

Unfortunately that already means something else.

So research will have to do.

Just don’t mistake it for the answer.

It is something much more useful than that.

It is input into a decision.

And the quality of that decision depends not simply on what you discovered, but on what you do with it.