NORTHERN PLANNER

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  • Communications planning 2

    So, communications/campaign planning. Where do you start? You begin at the beginning,with the objective.

    What's the business objective you're contributing? It's best to agree that as specific return over an agreed period of time….grow sales by 5% over the next three months, increase market share by 3%, generate £x million of revenue over quarters 3 and 4.

    That gives you some big questions to ask and enables you to makes some judgments on the COMMUNICATIONS TASK. Where will this share, revenue come from? What audience? How many of them will we need to involve ourselves with?

    Fundamentally, are you looking to get growth from existing users or new users?

    If it's existing, are you maintaining loyalty? Increasing frequency? Turning them on to new variants?

    If it's new – are you wanting to spur considerers to buy? Are you wanting create consideration?

    This should lead you to understand what you're really doing – increasing brand awareness, altering brand perceptions delivering new news, justifying price, encouraging trial or whatever.

    When Sainsburys asked AMV to help generate £1 billion more revenue, AMV had to decide of this should come from new customers or existing. When they broke down that revenue target, they realised that all they had to do was get an extra £1 from every customer visit. £1 billion sounds terrifying, £1 pound per visit from existing customers sounds very do-able.

    Carex realised a few years back they could reach share targets by getting existing users to wash wash hands more during the day.

    Break down the numbers into chunks that make it real. That will give you the communications task..

    Encourage existing Sainsburys shoppers to spend an extra £1 every time they visit.

    Get existing users of Carex to wash their hands more

     

     

    Or Nike who needed who saw that growth would come from inspiring the same loyalty in women as they did with men.

    Much of this should be in the client brief, but you would be amazed at the number of briefs that leave this out.

    Audience

    So this leads you to the target audience. You're answering two questions:

    1. To whom will the communications be addressed?

    2. What do we know about them that will help us?

    It's critical because you need to understand them in depth,  their relationship with the product, brand and design messaging, style, experience etc accordingly.  They may think the product is great, but there's a problem how they perceive the brand. They may not have heard of the brand, they may not be using the product as much they should/could.

    It also matters because you need to find the right way to engage with them and, when it comes to measurement of results, doing that with the right people.

    You can define them demographically (ABC1 mothers aged between 25 and 35), attitudinally (real women who like fashion but don't take it too seriously) or even behaviorally (women wish they had the time to  look good everyday, but can only make the effort the beauty regime requires on special occasions). 

    In the end, you're looking to answer- which group (s) can we influence that is BIG enough to deliver against the business objectives.

    When it comes to understanding them - core questions tend to be:

    What kind of people are they? What are their lives like? It helps to imagine a typical person and bring them to life in visuals and words. This is where TGI can be useful and other big, panel surveys,  - you can mix demographics, attitudes and purchase behaviour in any way you like and will quickly tell you what size of audience you're dealing with and loads of other useful stuff about media habits etc to help you engage with them.

    A word on TGI and developing audience definitions though – you need to have a think first. TGI always works best if you have a hypothesis of who you're after and then use the various statements to see how big that audience might be. For example, if you're launching a mass market naturally sourced product, there's no point going after people who only buy food with no additives for example – intuitively, the audience will be too tiny. Have a think about who might be interested in your product, and what they might be interested in, and have a play. Think about TGI qualitatively and let th data prove or disprove your hunch/point.

    Another thing to think about here is that you shouldn't stop with TGI generalisations. That will only get yu to a point when you know you've got an audience of the right size, interests, behaviour and attitudes. That will only get you to stereotypes, cliches and banality. This is where you need to start looking for insight – something you know about how they relate to/use th product/brand/category that no one has really addressed before.

    Going back to Sainsburys, they found that their audience tended to sleepshop – stuck in rut, bored with buying the same old stuff without the tools or courage to try something different.  

     

     

    Honda found that they needed to make the brand interesting. Once people test drove the car, they tended to buy, but it just didn't occur to them.

     

     

    Nike found that they had lost their credibility with serious athletes.

    Axe

    Axe found that to increase frequency, they had to inspire users to use it in the morning.

     

     

    VW found that considerers wanted a Golf but compromised with a less good imitation to save money.

    At it's best, this part of comms planning finds the right audience, frames the objective in terms of what you want them to do, know or feel that they don't right now and presents the opportunity then get where you need to.

    A useful tool is to lay out the purchase funnel – lay out the target's unique decision process and figure out which point you can best influence. At each step, ask why someone will fail to make the transition forwards, what can communications do about it…

    Search-funnell

    Read what they read, be them for the day, but at the end of the day, you can't beat going out and actually meeting them in their environment. Think about how the product/category fits into their life, or where it could fit in – work out the true culture around the category.

    I really love the relaunch of Old Spice. Of course, young men spray to confidence in the mating game – but in all aspects, the try too hard. What they seek is experience, they want to be seen as experienced and to get some.Rather than macho men with something to prove. Which neatly fell into the lap of th brand – "If your grandfather hadn't used Old Spice, you probably wouldn't be here".

     

     

    That will do for now, more later. Is this making sense? Useful?

  • QR codes

    Good stuff on QR codes from Mashable

    Petshop-boys

  • What really matters when you move jobs

    You may know I've switched jobs. You tend to move for 'big' things – money, culture, new challenges, location, work life balance, your last place gave you no choice. But what matters in your first few days/weeks is the small things. Top 1o things I think you really need to know when you start a new agency are:

    1. When is payday and have I joined in time to make this months payroll?

    2. Where is the kitchen?

    3. Where do I get stationary?

    4. What are the REAL hours?

    5. Where is accounts? How do you claim expenses?

    6. Who and where are traffic (they know everything and you should get to know them quick)?

    7. What are the cliques and friendship groups (they are always there)?

    8. Where is IT, what are they like? Where is everything on the system?

    9. What do people do for lunch? I want to join in and stuff (assuming anyone takes a lunch!) but I don't want to be pushy and I'm shy. Will people think I'm arrogant if I keep to myself?

    10. What's the best route to work and back? How long does it really take?

    Walking through the door is always a leap, especially when you're shy. The tour around the place is always awkward, people sizing you up, trying to think of something to say to everyone, knowing you'll immediately forget everyone's name. I hate the royal family but you've got to admire the way they do the endless meet and greets without cutting their hearts out with a blunt spoon.

  • Training for The Great North Swim, the beginning

    So I've quietly  been getting on with training for the Great North Swim. Working out my notice at TBWA helped getting in the swing of things, amongst thinking about women's hair and chickens (not at the same time) I progressively had more time to, in the first instance, have a lunch break of sorts, and then really long lunch breaks.

    The first few sessions we're the same. 800 meters warm up. Swim 1,500 meters (nearly a mile) as hard as I can. Rest for two minutes, then swim 800 meters as hard as I can. It was all about baking some endurance into muscles that were not only used to not swimming as much as they should, they hadn't been asked to do long distance swimming much at all, ever.

    At first, just getting through the 1,500 has been tough, at around 1,000 everything started getting ragged and progressively worse. The 800 was a nightmare.

    It's always odd when you do your very first session. It's at once depressing finding out how bad you are and exhilarating to be back in the routine, knowing you're going to improve, anticipating the day when the hurt begins to fade a bit and you have space to REALLY train, looking forward to weird trance like state when you're at one with you're body, not really thinking, totally lost in it. Not really present, but in the moment more than ever.

    That's what most swim races were like for me. The odd trance state thing. I can't really describe the build up or the race, but I can vividly remember how it felt to finish. Weird that.

    Anyway, eventually there was the session when the pain still kicked in, then went away. It's been like that ever since and I'm getting faster. Little niggles in the stroke are getting evened out. My elbow wasn't high enough on the left, meaning my head came too far out of the water when I breathed, meaning my legs kicked too hard to keep balance….little things, small corrections.

    The joy of doing something well. Doing what you're best at.

    This week I'm going to introduce some speed. 50m sprints, probably 20 of them with 10 second rests in between. I'll need that at the start and at the end. When open water races start, it's crowded, a bit of a free for all, you get elbows in the face once or twice. I want to pull away from as many people as possible. Then at the end, I don't want to limp home, I want to get that extra zip in the last few hundred meters, it will feel good and I fancy overtaking people at the end, no matter how badly I've done.

    I'm going to experiment with some medleys (a length of every stroke).They get the heart pounding and it will stop any muscle imbalances developing – the problem with doing front crawl all the time is that you can't help using some muscles on one side more than the other. It doesn't matter over short distances, you breathe every three strokes, alternating sides…but that' not possible over long distances, not for me.

    Anyway, if you're not bored by this, I might resurrect Tired is Stupid. I never did that properly, but the three people who read it liked some bits of it.

  • The social media guru

    Eye-wateringly true…
     

  • Campbell

    I would be surprised if you're not familiar with Rob Campbell and his blog. If you're not, where the hell have you been?

    Anyway, he's decided to write  one or two nice things about me. There's even a picture of the Smiths. He hates the Smiths. Loathes them, nearly as much as he hates Grey.

    The only way I can respond in kind is to put this picture up. He loves them.

    Queen

     

  • Playing digital catch up

    If, like me, you have one or two planning craft skills but are finding you need to catch up really fast on things with a bit more a digital focus (and let's face it, who isn't? Not least when planning for anything that's likely to involve the web, which is pretty much everythin these days, is as much about technology and execution way before a creative brief – if you bother with one),  a good place to start is this post and the links to previous subjects.

    I wouldn't get too hung up on knowing everything though, that's what collaboration's for.

  • Collaboration is useful eventually

    You've probably heard of the Large Hadron Collider. If so, you might be a bit relieved at not having perished in a black hole, more than likely, you wonder what the point of it is, it doesn' even work.

    Black-holes

     

    Even in we never discover the Higgs Boson, or it doesn't teach us much more about what the universe is made of, it's still going to be really worthwhile, we just don't know what for yet.

    All sorts of brilliant things happen when great minds collaborate on a grand scale. The last incarnation of a machine like this was CERN, where a group of scientists, including Tim Berners Lee,  created the world wide web.

    Most of the great leaps in science happend from accidents in the lab, or when someone was looking for something else.

    Most of the big problems today are too big to be solved by one person, it needs collaboration.

    Things happen when great minds get together, that's surely a good thing, you just don't always know what they will be. 

    And, to shamelessly try and link that to the day job, get in  room with clever people as often as you can.Planning for campaigns is just too damned complex for one person…everyone's good at something, pool resources. Be ready to spot OTHER people's good ideas.

    Anyway, funny post for a Friday afternoon, but there it is.

    Have good 'un

  • Launch of Dantes Inferno by WK

    This is brilliant. The launch of Dante's Inferno not only shows that you can get lots of attention, interest etc without spending a fortune, it also reminds me that careful noodling with data, playing with Jive and general social web massaging can't beat creating something interesting…and being prepared to admit when things are going a little wrong. 

  • Back to the grindstone – communications planning post 1

    Once upon a time I wrote this post about finding a strategy and it ended up being some sort of greatest hit, in its own modest little way. It was part of an undertaking to provide access to some basics and processes. I thought it was important then and I still do.

    It's all well and good if you have a planning director and stuff, that's not always the case. Plenty of people use blogs and stuff to help them get an idea of what life is like as a planner, and it's not all blogging and coffee. Most of it isn't existential thinking, it's rigour and process (or it should be).

    But that side of this blog has tailed off somewhat in favour of post about tea, swimming and babies. Time to go back to it.

    I looked at that strategy post and I still like it, but it doesn't give you enough of a process, or make the distinction between brand planning and communications/campaign planning. I can imagine someone reading that, getting a little excited about their next project and realising they haven't a clue where to start.

    So this post focuses on communications/campaign planning. We're going to go through a process step by step. It's not the only way, but it's the most common. If you strip away the brilliant wrapping on some of the stuff we all admire, this is what planners will have gone through to get there. So we'll pepper this with examples.

    So yes, this is what most planners spend most of their time doing (apart from pointless workshops but that's another post). In my view, they want to change brands and their architecture too often, when there's no need.

    Put simply, if there's no brand ideain place or guide to how the brand behaves, what it stands for etc, you need to create one. This won't happen very often, and will be covered in another post. You may find when you're doing you're comms planning that actually, there is a big problem with how the brand is positioned. Rare, but it does happen. If that's the case, you need to look at the brand.

    But mostly, you're interpreting the core brand idea, or 'smudge' in my book in a new way that will help the client achieve their objectives.Like these two examples….

    Pepsi has always been about young people and youthful energy. The latest incarnation of that is a way to get them engaged with the brand – actually doing stuff with it rather than old style messaging. Their new interpretation is based around the observation that every generation wants to change the world and reacts against what has gone before. Which became 'refresh everything' – encouraging small personal acts every day to create a bottom up movement.Pepsi is too big to much besides 'brand involvement' stuff, but the every new idea is a new expression of youthful energy – that doesn't change. Just as Levis is always anti-establishment and youthful rebellion.

     

     

    Sainsburys has always been a quality food hero. Try something New Idea was the latest expression of that, built ona rock hard objective to get existing customers to spend £1 pound extra with every visit, in order to add £1 billion of revenue over a set period of time. The brand didn't change, what to do with it just moved in to help the business do what it needed to do…including galvanising staff instore.

     

     

    True brand architecture rarely changes, it's just that sometime you're looking for a long term communications idea to carry lots of smaller ideas.

    Does that makes sense?

    Actually, this is a post in itself, so more tomorrow. Into the process