NORTHERN PLANNER

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 if you stop there.

That goes for tone of voice too. This is an old rant, but the embers are still warm. More than once, I’ve been furnished with a hallowed huge tone of voice document from some brand consultancy,expected use it to inform the verbal and non-verbal bits of creative work. In other words, take the useless thing the ones a galaxy away from the creative did and make it relevant for the poor sods who have to actually execute something.

Now, to the bit I want to talk about. If you haven’t read Faris’ thesis on transmedia thinking, you should. If you still can’t be bothered (shame on you) simply consider that brand communication needs to be both complex and coherent accross a myriad of media, for a myriad of audience groups, who will mould the story in their own way, and talk to different people about in in different levels. That’s life I’m afraid.

And don’t scoff, that’s how  popular culture is going. The Star Wars films my have ended, but there’s a cartoon spin off coming this summer, and the next ”game’ is actually another prequel instalment in its own right, with a conclusion that turns the series on its head. Of course, you can stick with the films if you like, or maybe read a couple of books, or you may have read some of the comics as a kid – engage as much as you like. Not to mention the compexity of Lost, The Dr Who spin off series’ or even how you’ll neverf truly get Donnie Darko without some time on the website.

It’s not as hard or incoherent as it looks. George Lucas has a back story for Star Wars long before he wrote the first script. Jk Rowling had a core Potter timeline in place well before the first book. Tolkien created language and mythology for his world long before he wrote the Hobbit…depth, history….back story.

That’s starts with a film pitch quality for brands…something concise, but rich enough for lots of sub-plots (evolving tactical objectives), character arcs (different reaons to enage for different fans) and spin offs (brand extensions). Like Buffy’s ‘horror in high school’ the X-Files ‘paranormal FBI departement, the Bourne films ‘Crack assassin with amnesia’ and of course, the great Heroes ‘People with superpowers but not in comic book land’.

Write a back story first, look for the story arc, then look to compress it. As long as you know it’s generous enough for lots of episodes/chapters, it makes planning for brands at once consistent and liberating. It becomes, "Where should the story go now, based on what we know we need to achieve".

It’s only one way of doing it, but it seems to help me. Have a go, see what you think.

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. There’s a world tiddly winks champion, and good for him, he’s spent thousands of hours getting that good.

This goes for agencies, where the culture seems to celebrate the big names, the thinkers and the ideas people. On one hand, take away the junior suits who organise the meetings for other people who have to be cajoled, bullied and coaxed into meeting rooms, who do the contact reports and oil the whole client relationship where it really matters, the bread and butter day to day. A background as a suit make’s me quite organised for a planner, but I pale next my ghd team, they love the jobs I hate and make it look so easy.

Think about the real doers, traffic, the studio, the buildings manager, production, TV department…accounts who make sure we’re payed, dreaded HR who sort out pensions for us. No none talks about them, says thanks, or says hi enough.They should, without them we’d fall apart.

When you start in an agency, make sure you get to know the junior suits, creatives and clients really well, they’re the ones that make things happen. But if you really want to know how a place works, if you really want to get things done, make friends with the real doers..traffic, productions, buildings managers and, of course, the receptionists and PA’s. These (usually girls) know EVERYTHING, and can do lots of little things for you..the battle for rooms, the battle for their masters’/mistress’ time, and lots of supposedly little things that matter a great deal.

Here’s to the doers…ideas are nothing without them to see them through.

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 use of arm paddles that melted your muscles like warm Nutella. But he did me a big favour. One that applies to planning as well as swimming.

I won races against bigger and stronger boys in the last few metres as their strokes fell apart. While strength and energy glossed over the, sometimes miniscule, flaws at the start, those little wrinkles in technique became too much. Strategy is a bit like that you know.

Maybe you’ve written a brief that sings, full of drama and inspiration, there’s just a little nagging doubt,something just isn’t quite right. There’s the creative review where the work leaves you buzzing, but at the core, something doesn’t feel quite right, it’s nothing major, it’ll be fine, it’s interesting enough to gloss over that anyway.

But like the boys with the slightly flawed strokes, the further you go, the louder those quiet little cracks sing. 

Hopefully someone in the team will bring this up, but to be honest, you’re the planner, it’s your job to make sure the thinking’s water tight.

Now imagine you’ve let it lie. You’re doing concept testing, the client’s there, whole team’s there, and it unravels. Or it gets to presentation to the board, and they rip your client to shreds.

And who will get the kicking? You will. You’re the strategist, you should have pointed it out.

A little patience at the level of the brief, or a little bit of unpopularity when you play the logic card at the review really is worth it in the end.

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 be honest, I reckon there’s isn’t enough proper, basic craft around the planning corner of the internet, or day I say, the industry in general.

So…..

I’m not going to commit to a timetable or anything, but a start could be:

Handling Clients

Segmentation – how to find your audience

Any other suggestions?

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 and brands, you’ll know what I’ll mean. Most gleefully pelt shiny, fresh new Damascus discoveries at us like the shiniest, freshest thing since bread came sliced. Mostly, they’re thinly disguised new business tools, or re-packaged observations on basic craft, or trends that have become mainstream. They, and you, know who they are. But one or two rise above this and are genuinely useful. Truth Lies and Advertising and Eating the Big Fish are the best ones for me, but Herd and The Brand Innovation Manifesto work for me too. What they tend to have in common is a toolkit to frame your thinking, rather than how to think in the first place.

Overall, there seems to be an agreed evolution of how brands have worked in recent history:

1. The unique selling proposition for a time when products were genuinely different to each other.
2. Consumer insights – magnifying an observatio about a target audience’s relationship with the category/brand/service/product.
3. Disruption – as attention got harder to earn, brands began to wilfully break the rules to stand out.
4. The age of brand insights. Ignore consumer insight, don’t disrupt for the sake of it, as consumers demand authenticity, make a truth about the brand/company/product service as interesting as possible. Target conversations rather than groups.
5. And I would argue that we’re moving into the age of the stunt (Sony, Drench, Bud, Gorilla), where being interesting matters more than being salient (and maybe salience doesn’t matter at all!!

Most books and papers seems to argue for one of these ways of thinking about brands and, therefore, ways of developing strategy. But the problem is, life is just too messy. Sometimes it’s right to dial up the brand culture, sometimes you’ve got a genuine USP and shoulf just get out of the way, sometimes the brand is so big, it just needs to steer to keep it salient or interesting.

But to be honest, good ideas tend to be a pivotal observation that observes all of the above (with a possible exception of USP). You can’t decide the best thing to do without understanding something about your audience, the brand and the competitive context…and I’d add something about the consumer culture around the competitive context.

When you know what the right thing to do right now is, you can decide what element of your brand toolkit to dial up. That’s how it works for me.

I’m not saying that you won’t have found your voice after 7 years or so. You’ll have an act, a way of doing things…..but in the end, be very nervous of models and proprietry process. Ideas tend to emerge, mostly over time, mostly out of meeting rooms.