The next bit of planning basics will be about how to go about formulating strategy, but in the meantime, here's two things I've been thinking about recently.
First off, have a go at Rob's Account Planning School of the Web project, it's quite, quite brilliant. Russell's chosen well. I'm slightly nervous about my stint next month.
The other thing is about telling the truth - or avoiding BEAUTIFUL LIES. Let me explain.
At work, we have this healthy habit of doing creative reviews every month or so. Not our own stuff, but work out there that's interesting (by the way, this is bloody useful practice for working on strategy. If you get in the habit of working back from others' work, starting you're own becomes second nature).
Trouble is, while there's a certain amount of great creative ideas, so few seemed to be based on any discernable, genuine product, service or brand truth.
Quite a few seem to blur, bend, or wilfully lie about what they're selling to fit a particular consumer insight, or gap in the market. The wonderfully constructed edifices seemed to crumble as soon as you applied any sort of common sense or ask the simplest question. These days, that's simply not good enough.
Once upon a time you could get away with this. The Nescafe Gold blend couple told you nothing about Nescafe except position them where they wanted to be. And the old Lurpak trumpet fellow was pure invention.
That was OK when we were all less marketing savvy, now you can destroy any artifice or overclaim with a single blog post.
And just to make it even tougher, now people can largely shut out brands they don't like, you have to seduce, entertain and be interesting like never before. So you need a strong TRUTH to wrap all this interesting stuff around - about what you're selling, or how and why who's selling it goes about things.
This is nothing new - Truth Well Told may well be THE most famous agency mantra. But it's not on option now, it's a must. Consumer insight is great, market insight is too. But until you've sonething TRUE to say about the thing you're promoting, your just telling BEAUTIFUL LIES.
Absofuckinglutely.
To reuse an analogy of mine:
The truth stretching medicine salesman who rode from town to town could just pack up and go somewhere else when people stopped buying. Now, people know what he sells and if they want it before he even arrives.
Posted by: Rob Mortimer | May 15, 2007 at 02:37 PM
Nice one Rob, that's brilliant. Hope you don't mind me nicking it...
Posted by: NP | May 15, 2007 at 03:53 PM
Feel free to borrow it ;)
Posted by: Rob Mortimer | May 15, 2007 at 03:59 PM