NORTHERN PLANNER

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.

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 and its role in humour. Polysemy is where a word had more than one meaning, which you can deduce from its context within other words and sentence construction. Like red has a variety of meanings – red-hot, red-hair, red-alert for example. Red hair is ginger, red-hot is a particular expression of heat that is very hot, but not as searing as white hot (thought red hot coals are orange).

These words are brilliant for wordplay and dry humour -like Mae West’s, " Marriage is an institution, but I’m not ready for an institution yet". Flipping the meaning of ‘institution’ get the effect.

Or WC Field’s answer to, " It must be hard to lose a relative". The answer was, "Nearly impossible". Changing the meaning of ‘lose’.

So what’s my point? Well, I get nervous of propositions in briefs that try to be headlines. But you do need to make them interesting. They need a hook, some tension. I think that this kind of polysemous wordplay is a great trick to make them sing out without falling into the trap of writing a headline.

I’ve often got out of being stuck by using liberating not for example. This usually works by looking at what great about something, and dramatising what it ISN’T rather than what it is. So Lynx is NOT dirty. This works through the more than one meaning of ‘dirty’.

Then there’s the trick of forcing a word into sentence it shouldn’t really live in, using metaphor. It forces the reader to give it more attention than it should normally warrant, paints a picture in the mind. Make information emotional, not just fact. Like Tom Lebvers’ " Soon we’ll be sliding down the razorblade of life". Which makes ‘life is hard’ more graphic, you can almost feel it…which brings me to maybe my favourite proposition – polaroid is not a camera, it’s social lubrication (by the way they get to this by giving wedding guests free cameras and seeing what they did them…doubt it would have come from groups!). It allows you some traction, friction or whatever metaphor you like, in a sentence.

I’ll be looking for polysemy and metaphor in my propositions. I think it’s a good way of finding hooks, unless you’re one of those natural proposition writers. If so, count your blessings.

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 it’s delivered in an inspirational way, but it’s so much more than that.

Most history, and in fact, most news and current affairs tends to focus on politics and big, macro stories. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. There’s the rhythm of everyday life, the conversations, the hopes, the fears, the language. You only get a good sense of that from poetry, books and (last century anyway, films, radio and TV). What this book does really well is get down to that level and think about what real life was life for real people.

This is something planning folk should think about more. Big grand strategy is all well and good but what’s the grammar and rhythm of everyday life? I can assure you that the texture of the everyday for the Fashionista girl I’m beginning to know as well as myself is at once very similar and incredibly different to my own. The trick is to know how and why.

On another note, the people from the 40’s 50’s and 60’s seemed totally alien to me, until I realise they are still with me now. They’re called Grandma and Mum and Dad. Not sure what this means, but it seems very important. I suppose it puts credit crunches and oil prices into perspective. I should ask about stuff like this more, what it was like they won’t be around forever. That’sa big part of growing up for me, seeing your parents as people rather than just ‘parents’.