Why Satnav and a Gorilla show us that planning tools are Trojan Horses of the obvious

One of my many failings is my useless sense of direction. SATNAV and Google Maps are a godsend for a numpty like me.

Blatant excuse to show this..........

 

I was lucky though to have grown up in a time when there were not the tools to do it for you. The AA Route planner and real maps became my friends.

And I got very used to being lost. Got used to not panicking, leaving enough time in the first place and getting there.

Which means when the tools let you down (and they frequently do) you actually want me in the car with you.

When it comes to the tools for our job, media agencies tend to be amazed how loads of creative agencies you will have heard of don’t have some of the basic planning tools.

I don’t mean the sexy stuff like TGI Worldpanel, NVision or the latest YouGov Profiles doo dah (you can get a watered down version of Profiles here).

Stuff like basic TGI, Mintel, Touchpoints or access to WARC.

Now these tools are bloody useful of course, but they have problems.

TGI is based on claimed behavior and as has been said ad nauseum, people rarely say what they do.

Touchpoints is more diarised of course, and real time reporting means you get a decent idea of what people do. But no clue about how they feel about it, or why they do what they do.

Mintel is really someone else’s opinion on market share and TGI. And don’t believe their observed trends – it usually means it has been observed twice.

WARC case studies are really helpful for all sorts of industry stuff, case studies and awards papers are great for inspiration but every single one is a representation of a perfect world, where everything works like clockwork, where there has been an ‘invented crisis’ and some earth shattering insight to overcome it. When of course, every agency process is a variation of chaos, post rationalization and gut feel.

The tools are great for the ‘sell’ – case studies and data that justifies the thinking are great.

But the problems with tools is they’re too easy.

They keep you at your desk, settling for easy answers that at best tell you ‘what’ rather than ‘why’.

They allow you to have an opinion and then justify it.

Rather than finding a fresh perspective.  

They allow you to have a point of view on your target customer without ever having met them.

They are Trojan Horses of the obvious.

Now, of course, creative folks without the tools can be VERY guilty of assertion without making any effort to prove it.

And some quotes from Trendwatching or NVision loosely linked to your ‘insight’ don’t count.

But the good organizations are great at having an informed opinion by constantly going out and meeting their customers, reading what they read and doing what they do.

I think a great example was when AMV wanted to prove that Sainsbury’s customers sleep shopped, so they filmed a Gorilla roaming about instore, being mostly ignored by customers and showed it to the client.

Deep insight you won’t get from TGI.

Aligned with the fact that most bought cookbooks are left unread you have a lovely tension between the pressure of habit and routine and the pressure to be a ‘foodie’ you get ‘Try something new today’.

 

So.

By all means use the tools, but only as a starting point and by way of the final ‘sell’.

Please do the desk research, all the crumbly stuff out there on the web.

By you can’t beat leaving your desk and actually being your audience.

Because the problem with relying on Satnav, and planning tools, is that you don’t know you’re lost. 

Comments

[Faris]

Did they really film a gorilla? Like the basketball team experiment moonwalking gorilla?

Do you have a source? That's rad

I use both in my book but not together!

[Northern]

Hi there
It's claimed they did in the APG case study for Try Something New today.
Looking forward to the book!

[Northern]

"INSIGHT – SLEEP SHOPPING

It sounded simple, but what exactly was the customer behaviour we were trying to change? We had a hunch, and instead of conducting research to support it, we conducted an experiment.

We repeated a classic demonstration of 'change blindness' – a phenomenon where the brain is unable to detect new stimulus when focused on a specific task. We had discovered an experiment conducted at Harvard University, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. The tape was played to people who were asked to count the passes made by one of the teams. Around half failed to spot someone dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though they had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera, thumping their chest.

One Saturday morning we dressed a man in a gorilla suit and asked him to walk around a supermarket. We wanted to see whether any of the shoppers noticed. Our hunch was that they were so stuck in their routines that they wouldn't even look up. They didn't. They were sleep shopping.

The Harvard experiment told us that we had to encourage shoppers to come to the store with new expectations – to look up and see the gorilla. It wasn't about trying to shock and disrupt their shopping experience (if they hadn't noticed the gorilla, then what chance would more shock tactics have?). To earn an extra £1.14 from sleep-shopping customers we would have to send them in store with the expectation that they could find something new to try and fulfil that expectation at point of sale"