In my sleepy-almost-not-working state, I almost reacted to this post here on 'I Am The Client' (HT to Adlandsuit)...

...thankfully, I realised after reading a few more posts that it's a satirical blog.  At least, I'm pretty sure it is...

The post is called 'Planning - I'm getting the fucking hang of it'. 

I should have twigged immediately, in hindsight. 

Here's a sample...

Now, good satire is always close to the bone; it works because it's so close to reality that it's not hard to imagine it being true. 

And the whole post is certainly rooted in what you may come across in the worst kind of planning... confusing, bewildering PowerPoint documents that mean nothing at all.  Making the simple complex, rather than vice versa.

But that first point is right; it's hard to identify what planners produce.  But not because planners don't exist. 

It's just that you shouldn't really know that they're there. 

Planners should be invisible. 

No, not literally.  But they should provide something that's only noticeable when it isn't there, rather than when it is.

There are various analogies that have been used over the years to help describe this...

Will pointed me to the 'bass player' one from Russell Davies' blog a few years back...

"I'd add something. BE LIKE THE BASS PLAYER. Like Sting on Walking On The Moon. Like McCartney on tons of tracks. Be a backbone, keep it simple but unforgettable."

...which Will himself extended here in his Art Brut inspired 'we formed a band' post...

Planners then. We're quite clearly the bassists of the whole operation. Making sure the work hums along, is in rhythm with what the client and the audience want. Bands/Advertising can work without us (Sony 'Balls' is clearly an extended guitar solo of creativity), and we must never forget that. But with us, we can make the work groove along

But just to confirm to a planner stereotype, here's another analogy, spurred no doubt by the snow in Brighton today.

Imagine a lovely fresh Alpine mountain, ripe for snowboarding down... 

...I mention snowboarding because as we've now got an eleven week old son, the chances of us going in the next few years are slight, so I'll live vicariously through my own analogies instead...

 


Planners aren't the snowboarders.  They aren't the people carving and jumping all around the piste.  That's the creatives, or the digital guys, or the direct guys, or the client themselves... anyone who's actually 'making' the visible things you can see.

Planners are invisible.  They come out at night.  They're setting out the poles at the edge of the piste, bashing down the snow, de-icing the lifts.  They're creating the perfect space for everyone else to board down the next day. 

They find new runs across the mountain, and improve the most popular ones... all the time creating space for people to rip down the next day.

They're only noticed when they stop doing it.  Or do it badly.  When the pistes are too boring, bumpy, dangerous or tame.

So if great planning should be invisible like this, we get to two problems.

Firstly, personal recognition and feedback is difficult for the invisible (wo)man. 

Hence, no doubt, the number of planners who write blogs and talk at conferences... in an industry that thrives on recognition, the 'invisible planner' wants to be seen.  Not an insurmountable issue, and not as important as the second one...

Which is this; thinking back to the 'I Am The Client' post, and the satire/truth issue...

...if clients (and in this day and age we're talking procurement folk too, remember) can't see the 'invisible planner', then how do/can we expect them to pay for planning? 

Why would you pay for something that you're told is there, but is impossible to see if done well?  From another perspective, it might all seem a little 'Emperor's New Clothes'...

After the Battle of Big Thinking a couple of weeks back, I've been doing some pondering on the nature of 'brand', and why (in some cases at least) this notion of 'brand' is now more of a hinderance than a help.

(For a quick recap, you can read & hear the presentation here)

i) A brief history...

I keep coming back to the fact that 'brand' was developed as a device for another age. 

Interesting, complex, diverse organisations had to compress all of the interesting information into a 'statement of best fit' that would travel through the mass media system.

'Brand' of course could be many things; at it's simplest, it's a mark of consistent quality, a guarantee of a product inside that was as good as the last time you bought it...

...and at it's most complex, it's a 'transformational' device which lent the product intangible value when someone was drinking it because they believed in the 'brand', not just the product inside.

Which is why Coca-Cola always beat Pepsi in taste comparisons when you could see the brand, and Pepsi won out when the brands were hidden in the blind taste 'Pepsi Challenge'...

(If you don't know about the disaster that was 'New Coke' that came about because of the Pepsi Challenge, read about it here)

By and large, Paul Feldwick's description of brands as...

'a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer'

...held true. 

People learned about brands through advertising in between the mass media entertainment they watched, read and listened to.  

That 'collection of perceptions', if you skipped from person to person, would be largely the same. 

Which is the principle we built our industry upon...

ii) Compress & Repeat

Advertising, Media, PR, even Digital to some extent... we all still are bound in by this construct of 'brand'. 

We get together in rooms with and for our clients, and make the best sense of it we can, so that we can compress things down, and create and disseminate endless repeats of that simplification.

Which is when we get to places like this...

"...we are currently in a brand anchoring process where a brand cube will be formulated"

(something Ben overheard and put in his twitter stream today)

 

What the fuck does that even mean?  We should step back and listen to ourselves sometimes...

Anyway, here's the thing... we create these brand pyramids and onions and cubes and so on like everyone is still holding the same set of perceptions as everyone else in their heads. 

The brand cube probably worked enough when everyone thought the same three things about a brand, and it let agencies get on and do stuff. 

But nowadays I fear that trying to compress and repeat leads to us discounting and throwing away great ideas that would deliver value, just because it doesn't precisely match the rest of the luggage.

We're still missing the fact that people are not as homogenous as they once were.

iii) The jar of marbles

Where once people were all exposed to a limited set of information largely via mass media, nowadays we have so many different sources of information about companies and products (not least each other), that the notion of 'a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer' is redundant. 

Imagine the 'collection of perceptions' in your head for a brand were like marbles in a jar.

When the different kinds of marbles that existed were limited (and companies & agencies were in control of what the marbles looked like), then you could go around every marble jar in the land, and find a limited number of variations on a theme. 

Now, Jeremy Bullmore said in a 2001 lecture that 'no two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand'.  So maybe we always knew that, as an industry...

...but in the mass media landscape, the variations were limited enough that creating a central 'brand' based on five marbles was good enough... people were likely to have at least three of those marbles in their jar.

Nowadays, there are ever-increasing numbers of marbles about your 'brand' that people can collect and store.  Only a minority of them are designed by you, or distributed by you.  The rest come from Amazon reviews, facebook updates, mumsnet posts, videojug instructions...

...the list goes on, but what it adds up to is a jar of a lot more (and a lot more varying) marbles in everybody's head.

Which means that trying to create a brand campaign that has 'five marbles' to it is increasingly unlikley to resonate in as many heads. 

So what do we do now?