Sometimes the most simple things can be fascinating if you look hard enough, in fact if you just scratch underneath the surface a little. That’s one of the arts of planning for me, there’s no excuse for a dull creative brief, whatever the category. Or the obvious, first stuff thought stuff either. There’s always another…

Before I go on, brand essences, visions, positionings, onions, ladders and God knows what have their place. Sometimes you need a box full of ticks to give you a common frame of reference with clients, especially at board level. There, I’ve said. But you’ll find it hard to get something interesting enough for today’s mediascape…

Like I’ve said before, we’re all good at something and we should respect and celebrate that, or in another way, those that do things we can’t, or don’t want to. When I worked on Morrisons I had to spend some time working a checkout and failed miserably, checkout people make it look very, very, easy.…

When I used to swim I was lucky to have a coach who forced us to refine constantly refine our strokes. it felt like being trapped in a mind clamp of boredom,  I just wanted to pelt up and down the pool…he had us doing endless drills, not to mention repeating tumble turns and the…

You may have noticed that posting has been going down around here for awhile. There simply isn’t enough time to force everything into. So it’s probably a bit daft commiting to more planning craft posts, but that’s what I’m going to do. It seems that one or two people found them fairly useful, and to…

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…

So I finally got around to reading Stephen Pinker’s the stuff of thought. Which is every bit as interesting as I’d hoped. Far too much to recount here, you’ll just have to read it, but there was one bit that struck me about wordplay and proposition writing. There’s a little bit that talks about polysemy…

I loved history as child, and as grown up I still do since knowing where you came from can tell you a lot about who you are. So Andrew Marr’s a History of Modern Britain is a delight. He writes beautifully, which is a timely reminder that good information is made so much better if…

In Paul Watzlwick’s The Situation is hopeless but not serious he opens with a little story about the Austrians. A once great Empire, the sheer diversity meant that agreeing on the common sensical was virtually impossible and absurdity permeated every facet of life. ‘Simple problemswere impossible and impossible problems acheievable by default’. ‘Austria loses every…

When you developing strategy it’s very easy to do the right thing. You know, do masses of groups, prove your point with a quant study and develop an lovely, elegant strategy that makes total sense. Who knows, there may be shining insight. It will probably track well too. But you’re probably missing as trick. I’m…