NORTHERN PLANNER

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  • Why a brand is like an electron

    As far as I'm concerned, a brand is a collection of feelings and associations built up over time. At their best, there is vision or an idea that helps the brand create the right impressions for whatever they need to do. I thought it looked a little like this..

    Brand blueprints and stories 2 
    This means a general direction, vision, promise or whatever you want to call it (would you believe some people I came accross recently call it a 'brand dream' (!)) and communications ideas that cover off immediate objectives, remove certain barriers and help you 'tack' along.

    I presented this specific chart a while back. I still think this is mostly right, but there's something wrong I now think. That's the concept of a 'brand idea'. Let me explain.

    If you're launching a brand, you need an idea of course. You need to have a strong belief about the role you want to have in people's lives, what problem you are going to help them with, which people. What will it feel like? What will you always do? What will you never do?

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    This stuff matters. If you took Coke's means of production away, they could still sell their company for billions based on brand value. When Sainsburys was doing badly at the start of this decade (crap distribution) what kept them going was the loyalty of customers who wanted them to do well in a way that only Waitrose could maybe match.

    But you SHOULD only have to do this once. And I'm less convinced that a brand IDEA is that important. Abrand is broad church, a collection of feeling and associations, much like a person is. It's at once vague and familiar. You know it's Coke, Nike or Ikea through a vague recognition of atmosphere. Cue the self serving analagy.

    They used to think an electron was a single particel orbiting around the nucleas of an atom. A simple dot…you could predict where it was and where it was going.

    Atom

    Elctorjn

    Nowadays, as mad as it sounds, they believe you don't where it is, it can be anywhere within a given space – so you have to assume it is in all those spaces at the same time, a fuzzy cloud.

    Really brands are like that, they occupy a fuzzy space, more a smudge than a bullet hard object (or sentence). Sainsburys may well be Try Something New Today right now, but I don't think that's a GENUINE brand idea, it's a bloody good BIG communications idea. Sainsbury's longer, bigger brand story (smudge) is about commitment to good food – a food hero, something like. Nike is something to do with self motivation and hero worship. We, of course, know that Honda is about optimism.

    So what I think I'm saying is that a brand is rarely a big consistent idea. Plot the story of great brands over time and you see a series of great ideas that occupy a fuzzy area.

    The only time you need a BIG brand idea is when you believe one doesn't exist in people's heads, like with Honda. Even then, the story was there, it was just that not enough people knew the truth about the company culture.

    I think this means a lot more freedom for planning campaigns. Doing what is right for right now, dealing with what needs to be dealt with. Sainsburys will always be about great quality food, right now they're getting more out the customers they have and dealing with them having less budget, This will eventually change. But they found their way in the '90s with celebrity recipe ads.. and they're still doing it.

    When Apple found its way again in 1997 with'Crazy Ones' and the Imac, it simply rediscovered what it was about. To be honest, the ad is another take on the premise of 1984…Disruption (you'll hate that word if you work at TBWA). And both are part of a wider story/cloud/smudge…simplicity and humanity.

    Unless I'm starting from complete scratch with a launch, I'd be talking to lots and lots of people who are involved with the organisation, not looking for words as much as how they feel about the brand. What fuzzy space does it occupy? What it the atmosphere. Find that and you can have lots of ideas within it. They don't have to be the same, maybe not even the same theme, but together thet should create a smudge like and electron.

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    Thinking like this will help us manage what's going on right now, with the web enabled, Facebooking savvy consumer.

    The rules are not that different to 20 years ago, you still have to create something interesting, just more-so now that we can't bludgeon people glued to the telly. The difference is that if you're under 25, you don't want something totally finished, you want to be involved, share and be part of it. I think unfinished areas (and when you think about it a brand is never finished, it just evolves) smudges, areas or subject matter for conversations are far more suited to that. 

  • I’m idiot, being foolhardy and making every second count

    Yesterday was a day I won't forget in a hurry. It consisted of three major themes.
    First, I am an idiot (but you already knew that). We've had more than a bit of snow in the last few days, but I decided to set of to work anyway (that's a drive from Leeds to Manchester). It wasn't snowing much in Leeds and anyway, "It'll be fine". It wasn't. Exhausted after a three and half hour drive, when i got to work I simply picked up my laptop and set off home again, to make sure I got there. There's a (not so) fine line between being brave and being stupid,. I crossed it.
    That's proved by the second theme. Life truly comes down to a matter of seconds. It really is all luck. On the way home, navigating a precarious M60 motorway, I came around the bend, suddenly face to face with two mangled trucks blocking the entire road. The ice and slush meant the hastily applied brakes only just saved my from joining them after a nerve shredding skid.
    It had only just happened. If I had been 100 yards further down the road, if I had been twiddling the radio station, if I had been daydreaming, if I had been driving a little faster, if I hadn't dropped my phone getting in the car, making me set of 20 seconds later I would most probably be dead.
    I soon discovered one OK truck driver and one deceased one. Use every single second you have, you really do not know when it will be your last. Life is so much down to chance, anything could happen at any time.
    Which brings me to the final theme. When I eventually got home the first thing I did was pick up my 10 week old baby boy and hold him very tightly. What else really matters more than the ones you love? if you haven't called your Mum recently, call her. If you haven't told your other half you love them today, do it.
    And if you're waiting to try something, do something, say something you really want to, you might be afraid, you might be comfortable, I don't know, just bloody have a go (unless it's foolhardy, see theme one)

  • Happy New Year etc

    It has certainly started well…

    Leeds

    Supporting Leeds Utd is a little bit similar to liking Prince…years of waiting for him to make a decent album, you get the odd glimps of hope but he always lets you down and makes you feel worse in the end.

    Finally, after years of pain, Leeds have made me very happy.

  • Things I’ll be doing next year

    These don't count as New Years resolutions, more like commitments with a little bit of wriggle room.

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    This has been one hell of a year, best forgotten for many reasons we all know. But for me, that all pales next to 2009 as the year my son was born, something I'll remember forever. This is the year that my irreversably changed and I finally began to grow up.

    Re-appraising one or two things is pretty axiomatic when you become a father, and twinning this with a year that has made all of us think a little bit it feels like a bit of a sea change for me. Something like the end of the beginning of my life and the start of something I'm not quite sure what to call.

    I won't bore you with too many self indulgent details, but it feels like 2009 was the year when I began to understand what really makes me happy. And found optimism in that.

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    As you would expect, this has elements of work, relationships and self, but I now understand how important it is to find that balance.

    So while I feel truly priveledged to be a planner, it will never again be the thing that defines who I am and what I do more that anything else. That's hard in this industry, you don't survive in it unless you have a passion for it beyond the average worker and the hours can be all consuming. Being a good planner doesn't have to mean working somewhere with a 'respected name above the door' or working on sexier brands. A good planner finds a way to be interested in anything they work on and, therefore, make it interesting. Some of the most fulfilling work I have done was on a B2B brand that developed software for labs.

    I'll be a planner, and hopefully an okay one, but it won't consume my life, because my relationship with my wife and my little boy matter more than anything else. I want to see young Will develop and have a proper relationship with him, I want Juliette to still have a life of her own and I want to spend time with her as just people too. She'd my favourite thing to do and my best friend, I don't want us to wake up in five years time and realise we don't know each other any more.

    But there's also family and friends. Mum and Dad are not getting any younger, I want to make the most of these years when we're as much friends and child and parents. I'm very lucky with the friends I have. I've reached the age when you're left with fewer of them, but you know they're friends for life. I haven't seen enough of them for a long time, that won't be continuing.

    That's because there's the 'me' side to all this. There's the version of me that's really daft and doesn't want to grow up that comes alive with my mates. But there's the things I love doing too. Swimming. cycling, reading, coooking and films. I'll never do as much of that again with my boy here (and that's a pretty good exchange if you ask me) but I haven't experimented in the kitchen enough, I haven't don't enough swimming and I haven't started drawing and painting again like I promised my self I would.

    So this year I will endevour too:

    Do the Great North Swim and training properly, I want to do it well.

    Read a lot more fiction books and and less non-fiction planner type books.

    Try some new recipes.

    Dabble in some art – or at least a bit of drawing.

    Go to some music gigs more often with a couple of close friends.

    Quality time with Mrs Northern.

    Quality time with with my baby boy (and get him in the swimming pool).

    …and blog more, some of the above stuff should give me some decent subject matter.

    This will require taking back some time, I'm working on it.

  • Pushing a baby around a supermarket

    Right now I'm struggling with my image. This weekend, I took young Will to the supermarket and, pushing him aruond, happily asleep and outragously cute, I got the nod from other thirty something Dads with their little bundles of joy.

    Nothing has made me feel more pigeonholed into a demographic than pushing my boy around a grocery mult (apart from doing the same thing in a shopping mall). I'm the Mamas and Papas, combat trouser wearing, 'new man', cliche Dad.

    Made me realise, there are not really that many positive images of young(ish) Dads out there – or horrendous cliches, many of which star in advertising. There are few that are both real and aspirational.

    Also made me think how important it is to not lose your sense of self when you become a parent. There has to be at least one thing you keep for you. This is nothing compared to Juliette (Mrs Northern) of course, who's with him while I pootle off to work. Must remember to make sure she get's me time too.

  • Still loving Yorshire tea in spite of……

    In case you hadn't noticed, Yorkshire Tea is one of my favourite brands. I religiously warm the pot, take just a couple of careful stirs at the start and generally behave like a tea geek.

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    It breaks my heart to say I hate the 'tea time' work. I'm sure it works, I don't know what their data is telling them to do, but I don't think tea time should be treated with such flippancy (or play to stereotypes).

    Those little doses of slowness and ritual in the day are really important, I think there a real joy in tea's role in our lives. We deserve something great in these precious moments, from somewhere that knows some rituals should stay as they are.

    That's on opinion, that's all it is. I love my Yorkshire Tea too much to be put off by pretty bad gimmicky advertising (and website).

    But then, recently, I had a couple of Twittery based conversation that included Yorkshire Tea as subject matter and, low and behold, the brand is following me. Why? Do they want me to have 'a relationship with them?' I already have one. Where exactly have the engaged with me? Do they just want to have lots of Twitter followers or make it easy to see what people are saying about them?

    In any case, it makes me feel quite dirty being coldly sized up for something like this. I love tea, please don't waste that.

    I truly hope they want to be my friend so they can find out what I care about, listen to me and perhaps let me contribute. Hope….

  • What the X factor can teach planners

    This is a really thoughtful, insightful post on the X-Factor v Rage Against the Machine thing (and a good excuse to put up a picture of Saint Cheryl) and what it really means for music, popular culture and planning campaigns that genuinely capture the public imagination.

    Cheryl_cole

    As a person I hate the X-Factor, as a planner I admire it…too many people self combust with hatred at its success rather asking what they can learn from it….

    (found thanks to John Griffiths)

  • The 5pm tea conundrum

    There's a point around 5pm when you have to make a big tea decision. Do you make another pot, with all the warm, slow comfort that will bring (and perk you up for more stuff), with the risk you may be kept awake at night?

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    On the other hand, do you see sense and have something without caffeine (not decaff, don't do it I say!), safe in the knowledge you'll drop off untroubled?

    It's a toughie. Thankfully, this is something I don't have to worry. The addition of silly 'o' clock baby feeds to the routine means I can sleep at will (and even lose the fight to stay awake at finance meetings – they call for ridiculously strong coffee).

  • So…..

    …is Behavioural Economics going to be something agencies engage with properly?

    Or will it be used to justify the same old stuff?

    While we're on the subject, don't you find there are as many theories on how brands work as there are agency networks?

  • Simple post from Love

    I like this post on simplicity from love, wise words (and always happy to see promotion of In the Loop).