NORTHERN PLANNER

I get the train from Leeds to Kings Cross a lot.

Sometimes, the conductors don’t even bother to check my
ticket, that’s how often I’m on an East Coast train.

So maybe I notice stuff a little more than the average rail
passenger, but then again maybe not. In any case, one thing I don’t seem to be
able to avoid is posters all over stations, and arterial routes into them,
telling me how great the complimentary food is in First Class.

As is the case for most of us, First Class is a
very rare experience indeed.

Now I know they’re trying to get folks to upgrade. I know good
prices are obtainable too, as long as you book early enough. Surely though they
must understand that the necessity of business travel tends to fall into the
‘book it the day before we travel’ camp.

So they’re not going to get many upgrades on that count.
Plus, they should also know the ‘class’ thing usually comes down to company policy
and, as such, won’t get shifted by mass advertising. Most business commuters
don’t make the decision.

Of course, I may have this wrong and they can see revenue
potential from leisure travel, but surely that should be targeted around
weekends?

In any case, even if the upgrade strategy is bang on, to
quote that James song, “If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being
poor”.

Most people are happy with what they’ve got until they
realise others have it better.

Being reminded how great First Class is reframes the
experience of standard class immediately – from what ‘one is used to so fair
enough’, to something inferior.

 You notice the uncomfortable
seats a little more,  suddenly resent the
crowding at peak time, while delays become big problems rather than
understandable hiccups. 

(I personally am not fussed, the Year of Not Buying anything is teaching me to appreciate the simple joy of getting the train – the views, the chance to read the paper cover to cover and watch the oddness of people up front. I also enjoy berating people in the quiet coach for making a racket, but that's just the Larry David in me)

In short, they’re alienating most of their frequent
customers. Instead of feeling good about the brand, or at least not caring in
a benign manner, they’re made to feel East Coast doesn’t care and is prioritising
other people.

It’s the brand for ‘them’, not for ‘us’.

In a cultural climate where ‘the have nots’ are more than a
little resentful of the ‘haves’ being seen to pander to the imagined bankers,
CEO’s and others that have fucked things up for everyone else, doesn’t seem so smart.

If that wasn’t the case, this story about Gideon Ozzy
Osborne  squatting in First Class wouldn’t
have got so much traction as a story. 

If this wasn’t bad enough, East Coast are actually making promises
they can’t keep.

The majority of the  journeys I go on come with the tannoy
announcement that, “ First Class breakfast/lunch/dinner is cancelled due to
circumstances beyond our control”.

Bad enough they’re reminding everyone in standard class
they’re merely cattle –  apologising to
the imagined ‘better’s in comfy seats, acres of leg room and decent tea and
coffee – even worse, they’re telling EVERYONE  over and over again how feckless they are.

It makes the commuter
think, if they can’t get dinner right for the people they’re bothered about,
how much are delays and cancellations due to crapness rather than unavoidable
circumstance?

Perception is reality. We all look for short cuts to help us make our minds up about things, constantly telling folks you can't get little things like food right begins to get neurons to burn an automatic 'East Coast are not reliable' path in the brain.

So if your client is asking you to make promises
about service or performance, however insignificant they may seem, make sure they can keep them and consider how it might affect the wider commercial context.

Because making promises that make the  majority of their customers feel inferior isn't great.

Breaking them once is very bad.

Failing over and over again makes them look feckless and suggests
they’re crap at everything else.

Telling ALL YOUR ACTIVE CUSTOMERS about this, even
when it’s nothing to do with them, is plain dumb.

Because it’s the little things in the actual brand
experience that can make the biggest difference usually, not the glossy ads.

Because takes time to build trust and create a relationship,  any sort of emotional context for that matter. But it only takes an instant to destroy it.

Because people remember how they felt about an experience far longer than the facts about that experience.

Because how you feel about anything is based on how it is framed. We all choose by comparison and reframing standard class from 'more convenient and comfortable than driving' to 'much worse than what people resent get" obliterates positive sentiment quicker than the Death Star annihilated Alderaan.

 

 Ads and stuff deal in
illusion of course (especially our collective self- delusion) but they need to
stay firmly aware of reality too.

Because it always bites.

More years ago than I now care to share with you, I went on a creative briefing course chaired by Saint Russell Davies. It was really a two day,"How to go about strategy" bootcamp, although bootcamp is a little misleading, because it was fun and inspirational.

The biggest eye opener was when we discussed the classic, "Why are we advertising" part of the brief and, critical to any strategy, the setting of objectives.

I came away with a new way of looking at the the way communications would be evaluated.

The first epiphany was a purist one. The second was downright Machiavellian. 

Number 1 – no one should never think about any sort of communications without considering the real business context.

All advertising, in it's many forms should be developed and evaluated in it's wider business context. Not 'building the brand' or addressing brand perceptions, not getting 'likes' 'retweets' or shifting sentiment scores.

It should live or die by how it addresses business issues.

Take Philadelphia Cheese. Whopping great market share, little need to spend any more money on much more communications when, surely, share in the category is as big as it can get (I don't know a thing about their numbers, this is pure deduction my Dear Watson). The only reason to part with cash, is to try and GROW the category. 

Hence the ongoing strategy to introduce more 'foodie' variants and increase reasons to buy through by portraying it as a cooking ingredient for busy families with no time for fancy cooking (all of them!), not just a 'spread'.

 

As Byron Sharpe might say, removing reasons not to buy.

You wouldn't get to this if you just looked at brand strength.

At best, you might ensure you maintained mental presence with customers, but just reminding people you exist is lazy and in, certainly FMCG companies, you'll try the patience of short term marketers who need to see quicker results.

In a purist sense, in my view, a rigorous approach to the business situation should inform everything you do, yes digital specialists and socia media gurus I mean you too.

Just because you're a digital agency, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be open to helping with stuff like distribution – perhaps you would create virtual pop- up stores for advocates to put on their Facebook pages.

If you're a bank and you want pissed off, but ultimately apathetic customers, to switch while they're still seeing red, perhaps looking for angry Tweets and responding personally and delightfully might be a place to start. That's what your social folks should be telling you, not, "Wouldn't it be cool to get people uploading pictures of themselves with funny angry faces".

But then we come to Epiphany 2.It's no good being a purist of your clients, or the people they report to are not.

Most of them are not.

Sorry about that.

The purist stuff is not that hard, most of us know the simple basics now:

Distinctiveness, not differentiation.

Penetration always wins over loyalty – so remove reasons to buy aim to connect with the widest audience possible

Fame and emotion, rather than rational

Build consistent memory structures, but refresh them

Spend above market share to grow it

Hard objectives always beat soft ones

But marketing folk and their agencies work very, very hard to make this much more complex and work to different agendas.

Passing the Link Test, reflecting the self image of the board, impressing shareholders, being seen to make a big change,winning creative awards, hitting sales volume figures, whatever the margin. Building loyalty and frequency with complex and needless CRM programmes. Building brand health scores.

Lord knows how many brand models and, of course, the legendary brand onion; as relevant to real people's relationship with brands as Neighbours is to Australian politics.

Lovemarks.

Media Arts.

The Transformation Way.

Big Ideas v Long Ideas.

This is the stuff that fills the agendas of folk that makes marketing stuff.

I've even been in a situation where our work grew consideration amongst non-buyers buy 10%, while econometrics showed we created a 3% sales uplift.

But it didn't grow brand awareness (it was already over 80% amongst target audience).

So we were fired.

Basically we forgot that the CEO only cared about campaigns that made him feel good about himself, not stuff that sold.

It's sad to say that the real, critical realities of creating business value quickly get lost in a quagmire of personal agenda, recieved wisdom and vanity.

I'm not being negative, I'm being realisistic. I'll even admit I've used research defensively to get work though I thought would help the agency shop window (the CEO was pretty 'persuasive').

So have you. Admit it.

So what to do?

A purist would say you should stick to your guns, since your job is to be objective.

A realist would say you should apply the same skills you use on creatives to the client business.

Just as you alter your brief and your briefing to creatives who want a tight proposition, or the ones who ignore propositions but love a clear task, perhaps the ones are comic book geeks and always respond to superhero metaphors.

You should find out what makes the senior marketer and the CEO of your client tick.

The marketing person is easy, ask them what stuff they like that other people have done, look at the patterns in what they've done elsewhere (I once worked with someone who would preface everything with "When I managed Quorn") what their vision is for the brand and what the single most important thing is they'll report to the board on.

The CEO is even easier, even if you never get to meet them. Read what they put in the annual report.

Then, naturally, you're going to do the right thing, but make sure you can link it back to whatever you've gleaned is the real agenda from your two stakeholders.

Like the Greeks in the Iliad, smuggle your true purpose in aTrojan Horse of ego massaging and percieved agenda.

 

In any case, don't fall into the trap of doing the right thing when it's not what anyone else wants.

History and poplular culture are, replete with tragic heroes, those who are doomed to suffer, even die, following their righteous cause to the end. In some cases driven to madness and self-destruction when they are taught the futility of their efforts.

(If you haven't seen The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent was a principled District Attorney who ultimately went nuts when his girlfriend died and he was disfigured in spite of, and also because, of his righteous mission).

However, it is also littered with those heroic but deeply flawed figures who ultimately did lots of right by doing a little wrong.They were a little more morally dubious, but they got the job done………..

 

I was reading this post about working with suits, (for no other reason than the fact I needed a reminder myself), and wandered into the comments, where I re-read something about presentations. 

"I would only expand them by saying
that in presentations a planner should be funny, witty and interesting
but a bit understating, not flamboyant. That's up to the creatives…"

This has been one of the best, common sensical pieces of advice I ever got.

It also helped me because, to be perfectly honest flamboyant I am not, I'm shy and a little absent minded, as, I suspect, is the case with most planning types.

Creatives have egos the size of planets (and that's no bad thing, if nearly all your work ended in the bin too I suspect you'd develop a few unique personality traits too) and, the good ones, present their work superbly, because they really care about it and understand how it works. 

The very worst thing you can do is try muscle in on their glory.

Just as there's little point trying to be the laser focused, 'personality that fills the room' relationship builder. That's the main remit of the account people.

Planners are not cleverer than everyone else, but they are wired differently. The see things in a different way. What might seem obvious to you is not to others.

So the biggest challenge a planner tends to face is the way they get to thoughts that insinctively feel right thing that are interesting and fiz with with potential, much, much quicker.

Hunches you can't articulate, smears of stuff in your brain that might not  make sense to you, they just feel right.

In fact much of the job is understanding how you got there, and bringing others on the journey. It can be frustrating when others 'don't get it' but if they don't, at best, you're not helping, you're just getting in the way while, at worst, you're coming accross as arrogant and superior.

And if you can't distill you're thinking down, it's not water-tight. Charm will only undo you in the end.

So aiming at slick flamboyancy isn't just political death, it also runs the risk of making you look too clever by half, making the folks you're trying to persuade miss the point and, if you can pull it off helping you get half-baked thinking through. 

Which will unravel later, usually when there's more money, reputation and relationship at stake.

One should be aiming to tell an interesting, entertaining story with memorable hooks that hold it together of course.

But the trick, apart from looking like you've worked hard and you care, is to find a way to include your audience in the story (as in all communication, if you're going to use a mousetrap, leave some room for the mouse), be a little self effacing and even a touch shambolic.

Find the story, then tart it up. Never fall for the Michael Bay method of storytelling – namely special effects to cover up the fact you haven't really got one.

 

(sorry)

God help us, maybe in way I'm suggesting be a little more like him……

 

 

I knew someone with a stammer once. The person had tried all sorts of voice coaching with only moderate success. It was only when he tried counselling and dealt with the pain and indelible shock of seeing his father die, that the stammer all but disappeared.

Because stammering wasn't the problem, not having dealt with that un-imaginable pyschological scar was.

When I was a child, I had chest infections and bronchitis all the time. In fact, when it came to lungs and breathing, I seemed got everything apart from pneumonia. Anti-biotics dealt with every new illness, but it was only when I started swimming 5 days a week that I banished illness for good, because the problem wasn't infections, it was weak lungs and general mild asthma. 

It's not just child illness and speech impediments. Many percieved problems are actually a symptom of something far more fundamental.

You can deal with the symptom of course, but like the mythical nine headed hydra, the heads will just grow back until you kill the actual beast.

You can pump up the flat tires on a bike before every journey, or you can actually change the inner tube.

You can continously look for dieting fads, or you can change your lifestyle for good. Or change your outlook and be happy with who you are.

Just as you can mask unhappiness with buying things, which just leads to buying more things, but at some piont, you need to address why you need validation from consumption and search for more sustainable source of happiness, rather than gratification.

Just as you can stimulate sales by cutting prices, but at some point you have to address why not enough people will pay full price.

This 'kill heads' or 'slay the beast' metaphor is useful when to applied directly to planning, and like everything else, planning is a lot more useful when it avoids chopping a few heads wthin in easy reach and valiantly gets on with ending the life of the fearsome serpent.

Solving business problems with creativity and brands,  rather than solving advertising or brand problems as an end in itself.

This isn't self -serving opinion either. The IPA Databank has conclusively shown that campaigns that set out to solve 'hard' business problems (business or behavioural results) have a 50% success rate against campaigns that set 'soft targets' (brand awareness, advantage and all that rubbish) with an average rate of 11%.

Taking the easy option, apparently, isn't that easy after all.

Further evidence comes from Byron Sharpe's How Brand's Grow where he brings us the full force of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute to show us that brands grow primarilly through increasing penetration.

Which means reaching non-buyers, which in turn means removing genuine reasons not to buy. Of course that means a brand needs to be distinctive, but that's more to get noticed at all with people who don't care that much, much less moving people through 'Familiarity to Bonding' and ad nauseum.

Intuively though, it makes complete sense, since most busines problems are not brand problems, they're business problems! Just trying to shift brand scores will not necessarilly shift sales, but trying to shift sales in manner that will maintain, or shift brand scores will.

This addressed the fact that less people were considering a Golf because it was being lumped with the Max Power brigade.

 

This was all built on the realisation that Skoda didn't need to persuade people to consider the brand, they needed to make them feel their peers wouldn't laugh at them.

 

Then, when enough people were brave enough to put Skoda on the long list, they needed to know more about the cars before they would test drive.

 

And you know what? The work I'm most proud of is actually for a bed retailer desperate for a sales uplift, where the problem wasn't conversion, it was footfall.

The research told them the blockage to people coming through their doors was brand awareness- no one knew where to go, or could be bothered to find out.

But their budget was tight and they didn't have the time to invest in a long term 'brand preference' campaign that takes months, even years to pay back.

But with a few additional depth interviews with people IN THE MARKET, we showed them that the gestation period between deciding you need a new bed and actually buying one was around ten months, and the biggest barrier blockage was the pain in the arse of getting rid of your old bed (back in the day, retailers wouldn't take away your old bed for claimed hygiene reasons all of them do it now).

So they were persuaded invest in their infrastucture, to take away beds as well as deliver them. 

Then do cost effective , tactical outdoor, within the vicinity of the retail parks where the client's stores were.

With a clear, simple, message, 'We'll get rid of your old bed for free', to create the "Sod it,why not, since we're here" moment and trigger spontaneous action.

It was the biggest growth in footfall they'd experienced, the biggest growth in sales volume and, most significantly, the biggest leap in profit. Because the cost of doing the tactical ads AND setting up the new 'take-away' service was tiny next to budget a huge campaign to shift brand preference would have cost. And they were able to charge a higher price for the bed to offset the take-away cost.

Then they put it well bought television and continued to build proditable sales further, but, significantly, the unexpected message in a world of 'sale ads' and the DEMONSTRATION of leadership and 'we get what you need' achieved additional growth in brand awareness and, more significantly for how brands really work, 'salience' that was unprecedented for the category and, indeed, any low budget tactical campaign.

I guess someone would call his a Behavoural Econimics case study these days. I just see this and the other examples as addressing the fundamental blockage to business success.

Now, if you're lucky, many of the briefs will be about the fundamental problem, but the majority will be about symptoms.

They'll ask you to chop heads much more than killing the beast.

One of the real skills of planning folk isn't to justify the executions, to be an 'ad tweaker', it's finding the correct role for the communication in the first place  -without telling to their face the brief was wrong. 

Diplomacy and tact are not just required skills for account handling. Sorry.

 

.

 

Still on the subject of being fast and good, team structure and process affect this massively.

To put it simply, big is stupid and cumbersome while small is clever and nimble.

Any sort of team should only be as big as it needs to be and, to be honest, smaller than that.

Both the agency team and also the core client team you work with.

Massive agency teams tend to, not just inhibit work getting out at a decent clip, they also inhibit quality.

Massive client teams will stop work getting approved any time and bestow an agonising death of a thousand cuts on it.

At a basic level, it's hard to keep everyone happy. In an agency team, everyone wants to contribute and feel they're part of it. Which only leads to compromise, which is not a reliable factory for good ideas.

Sometimes though, you're stuck with a big team, and let's face it, with the complexity of modern projects, it can be unnavoidable. Which means the best approach is benign dictatorship. A tight knit group of decision makers and a greater pool of surrounding 'doers'.

On the client side, decision by committee never works, because if you ask someone what they think, they feel obliged to tell you. Now, I've got to admit, I find creative reviews really hard, because, to be honest, at first, I don't know what I think, so I'm sneaky and make everyone else feedback first. If it's just me, I'll be honest and say I need to go away and think, to avoid saying something stupid.

I'm not horribly bad at judging ideas, but I need time to process them, we all do.

So if you're presenting stuff for the first time, you should try and insist it's to a core client team, and allow them space to think.

Otherwise you've got a blizzard of half formed opinions, even worse, they are from Jill from R&D and Bill from the insight deparment.

They will quickly become gospel, because no one wants to look like they've changed their mind in front of loads of people. Also, it's much easier to point out deficiencies in stuff than just say you like it, because no one wants to commit in big groups.

If you can get some sort of buy-in,especially with some sort of constructive feedback from  small-ish team, they will feel they own the project and, when it's time to share it and get buy in from other stakeholders, they'll try and sell it in, rather than conform to group think.

Smallness is also important thanks to quirks of human psychology. Millions of years ago, we evolved an instinct to resist change, to stop predators noticing us. We're hardwired to play it safe. That's the little vioce in your head that says's 'But what if?", "But what everyone else does is..". The practical, side of you that likes to stick to what it's used to. We all have this little, safe, boring little bastard whispering in the back of our minds, trying to kill innovation and originality – the lifeblood of ideas that will work, because 'being right' isn't enough, being distinctive is the most important objective. All those car ads that look exactly the same? All those researched to death campaigns that have been beaten down to the same, obvious consumer insight? That's the result of Mr Safe getting his way.

The more people involved, the harder it is to avoid a critical mass of people giving in to the sneaky little bugger. Innovation comes from small, tight knit teams who instill energy into things, not brakes.

At some point, of course, you need to anaylse your logic, but while it's easy to post rationalise and shape something great, it's next to impossible to inject an idea into something that's correct but utterly dull and precictable.

Finally, a word on brainstorms. In the 1940's Alex Osborn bestowed the biggest trojan horse of mediocrity (to quote Richard Huntington) in the history of creative agencies.

An artificial situation where any idea is good idea means that really crap ideas can get through. The phenomenon of social loafing gives crapness a good chance too, because in big groups, we naturally try LESS hard, because we hope someone else will pull the weight, and anyway, the group takes responsibilty for success, not the individual. 

Then there is the detrimental effect of social conformity. This is also a problem in focus groups. The people with the biggest mouths get heard the most and, because we all get along by mirroring and copying each other, it quickly becomes group think. Brainstorms are really a way for despots to get everyone to think they thought of their idea (which is how I approach moderation I'm ashamed to admit).

So again, forget big groups, aim for tight knit teams of people that trust each other to say what they really think.

Hope this helps.

 

 

And after that fast strategy stuff, here's a quick guide to faster briefing.

There are two reasons it matters.

Firstly, the best internal way to get maximise nimbleness is to follow the three steps outlined before in a closed room with the people on the team that matter. As a minimum, that should be one account handler, on strategy type and one creative. These days, a comms planner an interactive specialist and perhaps a social media specialist could or maybe should be there.

The core three, and everyone else, should have done some knowledge gathering before, then pool their brains, not leaving the room until you've agreed those three steps between you (or at least the first two). It's then the job of account handling to make sure it's possible. It's planning's role to validate it and, with media/comms planning, pinpoint where it should happen. It's creative's/interactive/social /PR etc role to bring it to life.

You need a creative brief to summarise that BETA strategy and bring it to life for everyone. Not just because everyone needs a shared document to work from, also the act of precis and distillation forces you to tease any wooly thinking and contradictions out create a  more seamless,simple and slightly better spingboard. It also provides the blue-print for a client presentationm which saves time too.

Secondly, the reality is that plenty of organisations still insist on a creative brief being written right at the start. That's kind of okay, especially if you use a 'task' based proposition and focus on the challenge or the barrier. For example:

"Make the reliabilty of Honda desirable instead of dull"

 

"Make Fox's biscuits famous for maintaining quality standards"

 

"Dramatise that ghd does more than straighten your hair, in fact it does what you want"

 

"Make the Market in Compare the Market famous enough to affect Google search"

 

It's also okay because the act of writing a brief forces your brain into gear, in fact it can help you develop your strategy as you go along.

The constriction of the boxes means that you can only write so much, and forces you to make the boxes fit together. The act of precis and constantly looking to connect disparate stuff enables you to go lightning fast as long as you're prepared to do the work. 

Here's how:

1. Stay in your chair. Switch off anything that might distract, in fact, go somewhere to be alone. This is all about 'Flow', getting utterly lost in the task, the point where you are thinkin without thinking, that heightened sense of awareness that is also totally instictive. When you're finished, it feels like waking from  a dream. That means you need to keep at it, get engrossed and don't let your mind wander.

2. Start. No messing around with post it notes or staring into space waiting for inspiration to come. Don't look at boxes and not know where to start. Just decide which box you can fill in first,it might be the objective, it might be audience, it might be support. Write it as well as you can.It might even be a proposition.

3. Look for connections. The act of writing one box forces you to think about other bits of the brief. Insight into the audience needs relevance to the overall objective, if you've written the objective first, it should already be sparking thoughts of what that means in human terms and writing about the audience first, their issues and what they care about suddenly makes you think of the context of the product/brand in their lives which should lead you to writing the support which, in turn should lead to a proposition.

4. Embrace Failure. Don't waste time writing perfect pithy prose, or being crisp and seamless. Get that first draft which is roughly consistent, roughly interesting and at least complete.Then look at what's wrong. Do it box by box. Keep chipping away. An amend to the support has implications for the rest of the box's or could turn the whole emphasis on its head. Keep going until you're happy. Don't stop until you are.

5. Get an editor. By now you're too close to it to be totally objective and you're brain is a little fried. You haven't got time for the overnight test, you need to get it to other stakeholders for sign off ASAP. So show it to someone who knows nothing about the project. From any department.They'll quickly point out what they don't understand, what interests them and what, on reflection might seem plain dumb.Consider, amend, edit, precis distill.

6. Don't wait for perfection. It's more important to be interesting and inspiring that 100% rigurous and right. Great work is rarely on brief, it's an evolution of that original springboard. Your time is better spent totally validating the final recommendation, not what inspired it.

In fact, a barrier to speed is getting people to sign off the damned thing. A great and sneaky tool for getting people agree a brief is to leave some room for them. Insert a couple of deliberate mistakes in it for them to amend and they'll feel like they'll have input and happily sign off a quickly edited document.

Hope that's useful.