It was once observed that people tend to view the
world through the lens of
their profession - and I make no excuse for doing
exactly that here. I have
worked across the industry - ATL, BTL and all points
in-between:
brand planning, account planning, connections planning, digital
planning and
communications planning – all titles designed to suit particular
agency disciplines.
Broadly speaking they all do the same thing: helping to
craft and deliver a client’s
brand message to the most suitable audience to
affect behavioral and attitudinal
change through the most interesting and
fertile ideas.
Oh – and as cheaply as possible!!!
All change
But we are now having to rethink the value planning can
create because cultural
and societal norms are being shaped by technology and
measurable patterns of
behavior are flowing through observable social networks
which were previously
hidden. Brands act like halos of associations that
illuminate a company, product
or service and most of these associations are
increasingly being shaped by
communities of human beings – not by agencies.
As
a result agencies are not entirely clear where they start and finish when it
comes to owning the ‘brand’ or the ‘customer’ or whether they are even the same
thing. Most will publicly play fair with the other agencies they are forced to
work
with on behalf of their client, but behind closed doors it’s still a bunfight
with much
poor quality work as a result. Connections Planning for example is a
planning silo
originated in media agencies and has been responsible for some of
the most
awful and intrusive urban spam imaginable – ‘turds on the landscape’ as they are
referred to. Does anyone really think we need brands to be displayed on
every
imaginable surface while we go about our day? Thought not.
What’s
changed?
The most striking thing for me is the uncomfortable
discovery that communications
doesn’t really work in the way we thought it did.
By that I mean behavior driving
beliefs and not the other way round. We tend
to buy things because people ‘like us’
are buying them so we will make almost
instant judgements based on that and then
spend time post rationalising it to
ourselves afterwards if we need to using peer
reviews.
Advertising acts as a
reference point – but rarely the thing that changes our
behavior. This is not
true of all categories – fashion being a prime example but it has
been the case
in most fmcg categories for decades: women purchase certain types of
soap
powder not just on price – but because their mothers tended to buy that brand
before them and/or so too their friends. I suggest a quick read of Mark Earls
brilliant
book ‘Herd’ for a peek under the hood on this one.
Now I do accept the substantial evidence that shows
sending people single minded
messages at key ‘moments of truth’ (dontcha just
love that term?) does affect
behavioral change, but as we all know it is
usually only incremental and comes with
high a wastage cost. Most of this
thinking was the result of overzealous management
consultants selling in the
latest CRM tools – 80% of which failed to deliver anything
except broken
relationships with customers as human beings were removed to make
way for
automation to reduce ‘cost to serve’.
New products are slightly different – they absolutely
rely on the oxygen of advertising
and PR - but even they are moving towards a
new model that relies on giving the
product away free to a group of people who
then tell their friends about it on MySpace,
Twitter & Facebook. Why? Well,
people like to share their feelings when they have been
the recipient of a
random act of kindness and it’s hard not to say nice things about a
company or
brand if the freebie you happen to be given is a shiny new Ford!
This is not
terribly good news if you are continuing to ply your trade with the belief that
you can change people’s behaviour purely through brilliantly crafted
communications.
Empowered
consumers and all that
So much of what we now accept about ‘the customer is
king’ and how technology
empowers people is ancient. Technology has been
changing the world since the
Stone Age became the Bronze Age and WOM has been
the key influencer on
behavioral change since we learned to walk erect. Two
recent examples I quite
like are the use of cassettes featuring the Ayatollahs
speeches fueling the Iranian
revolution in the late 1970s (Twitter bizarrely
now playing a role in the 2009 elections)
and the introduction of the ATL
equivalent of the BTL wastebin: the infrared TV remote
control in 1986. The
reality is we have always been in control - but we have chosen
not to exercise our
power until now.
Convergence
Planning: making sense of a messy business
As opposed to ‘target markets’ we can throw messages at in the hope some
of them
stick, we now we have to face the reality of dealing with multi-channel
narratives based
on non-linear and rather messy human interactions. Human
beings just won’t fit our
deterministic pen portraits on the creative brief – assuming
we even did one.
Damn their eyes!
Meaningful connections can only occur when it’s 2-way and mutually
respectful – just
like real life and so the issue we need to address is not just
the message but the
‘involvement’ we can expect as a result. ROI = Return On
Involvement. Planners need
to upskill and quickly to ensure their outputs
aren’t actually harming the very brands
they are there to assist by planning in
a silo – starting here and ending there is no
longer relevant.
Planners now need to be in possession of a fully functioning left and
right brain and
to multitask - not be a one channel pony.
I suggest the planner of tomorrow needs to have the following 4 key skillsets
The Convergent Planner should have:
1) Intellect of the brand architect
2) Financial acumen of the
management consultant
3) Geekiness of the hacker
4) Curiosity of the
social psychologist
I still believe the most important attributes are the ability to understand the semiotics
of a category married to the
extrinsic and intrinsic motivations and trait displays that
constitute patterns
of human behavior. It is easily as important as understanding RSS
feeds, tags, uploads,
dwell times, shares, quality of interactions, velocity, comments,
spread
ability and contextual search patterns. More of this in another post.
Interestingly, brand attitudes and tone of voice are probably the most
important factors
to creating valuable human engagement because it creates ‘propensity
to purchase’
rather than just sales and should be measured as for success as
such.
As Paul Watzlawick observed in his seminal work The Pragmatics of Human
Communication:
‘everything communicates always’ - from the raw information (the
‘digital’ component) to the
way we say it (the ‘analogue’ component), and as an
industry we have an image problem.
And so we need a new way to approach communications
strategy – not just what is dictated
by our siloed disciplines. We need something
altogether more holistic – the best of what went
before, merged with the best
of what we need now. If your title says 'Digital Planner' or a 'Social
Media Expert' (enthusiast maybe but 'expert' perleeezz) then you are not helping your agency
and your probably not helping your client either. You need to be a bit more... well, 'convergent'.