Northern Planner

Use more salt and butter

Obviously, in good restaurants, the food is great because of the craft skills of the chef and the quality of the ingredients.

However, when I was a graduate working in pretty decent kitchen, the head chef was humbly honest.

She said it tasted better because they add levels of salt and butter few dare to at home.

That's a little like strategy. 

You can't do the job without decent ingredients or craft skills. 

Deep knowledge of market, brand, product, audience, context, culture (in my opinion) solving a well honed problem.

All put into a key task, sanded down so it gleams. 

But without lashings of butter and salt: imagination, an idea not a process you have ticked.

Without the seasoning that gets everyone excited.

You have correct, but unremarkable blandness.

People won't care.

Not your colleagues or clients, who decide on emotion, whatever they tell themselves.

Not real people out in the world filtering out most of what they see and experience.

Who buy on feelings more than facts. 

Salt gets the blood pressure up, it gets the heart racing.

Butter adds richness and depth. 

That's not so great for long term health in cooking.

For long term brand health, it's essential. 

When the truth is awkward, but myths are easy, it's a great time to be a real planner

Warren Buffet is a man to be admired. He's obviously a good investor and manages to be a good bloke. 

He's pretty good at the odd turn of phrase like this one, "Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful".

It mostly means don't follow the herd, there is huge competitive advantage in not following the trends. 

 

Yet, despite advice from the the man who know to make money better than most.

Most agencies and brands do the opposite. 

Put up pictures of most ads in a category, they all look the same.

Then again, so many briefs seek to 'Disrupt' and shock people into being interested. 

So much work follows the same trends everyone has read.

So the same cool shit becomes wallpaper. 

When life at the moment is more interesting (euphemism) than ever.

Brands have forgotten to be interested in real life.

 

Planners too.

 

Relying on a social listening and masses of data to get a proxy of people.

Instead of seeing the whites of their eyes. 

It shouldn't take this, very important work from Saatchi and Saatchi on Meet the 85% to know how they feel right now. 

Scared, confused, frustrated, knackered. 

Life is full of tension and new habits and attitudes, yet most don't see it.

Betting on Metaverses rather than life. . 

 

Right now the truth is awkward and myths are easy.

Myths that people ever cared about brands rather than real life.

That anyone knows what's going on right now, when it's really chaos. 

That distinctive assets are the way to win rather than making people care. 

That approaching marketing in the same way as the 1950s when economics, media and culture are all different will work. 

That we don't need to understand people anymore, just target then precisely.

That social media followers mean commercial success. 

That 'Gen Z' is a useful audience strategy.

 

But when the the truth is awkward and myths are easy.

It's a great time to be a planner with both old craft skills and new media skills.

With imagination and logic. 

Who's able to get to the real truth about what a client really means in real  life rather than a pen portrait.

Who's brave enough to want to solve business problems instead of brand problems (or drive performance metrics).

 

When best practice has become anything but, and myths and process matters more than truth.

Let's get to work. 

Resilience is overrated

I love cycling, glued to the Tour de France this month.

Most think winning the Tour is a feat of individual endurance and it is.

But no can win without a team shield shielding them from the wind for most of the race.

 

When I was a competitive swimmer, it was incredibly hard. 

5 hours training a day, 7 years when my shoulders constantly ached.

I could never have done it without the people I trained with.

The friendship, support and simple feeling of not going through it alone. 

 

Which is why, when I  read Fortitude, a book that puncture's the myth of resilience, it made immediate sense. 

In a nutshell, extraordinary performers are driven by a trauma in earlier life.

It makes them winners in their fields but losers in real life, too focused on winning at all costs.

Many incredibly successful  but empty inside. 

Real, healthy ability to perform and deal with problems comes from connection to others. 

And having a purpose you care about. 

Living out of your comfort zone, but never so far the elastic snaps. 

 

Unfortunately, my early experiences of agencies was not like my experiences of swimming.

No one buoyed you up, it was sink or  swim (see when I did there).

I'll be honest, I started out in client services and failed. 

I was never going to make it because I'm too disorganised and honest to a fault.

But the culture back then didn't help, bullying was rife, blame was a weapon, survive or die. 

You could say it was a trauma, so you learned to be tough, to be 'resilient'.

I still shudder to think about some of the senior people I used to work for, but now I think I understand.

They had gone through exactly the same and didn't know any other way. 

They were still proving something to themselves.

Not knowing how to live, still fighting to survive.

Abusers were once the abused. 

 

I feel sorry for many of them now. 

I'm not totally immune though. 

I can still overpromise, stressing alone rather than admit weakness, because once you couldn't say no. 

I push too hard for excellence because once upon a time, nothing was good enough. 

I still get that sinking feeling when a stressful pitch is over. 

And feel more relieved at winning than elated. 

These, thankfully are exceptions, not  rules. 

 

Now I work like. used to swim.   

Working out of my comfort zone, but not too far.

Never letting others down, but learning to say no. 

Demanding the best from others, but knowing the best comes from happy people, not zombies.

Riding into the wind for others sometimes, sometimes letting them do it too. 

Looking for ways to collectively improve, not blame. 

 

There are still many out there who are brutal on themselves and others.

Who think you need to bleed at the cutting edge. 

Don't let them pass on what they have learned.

Help them get off their masochistic treadmill. 

For their wellbeing and yours. 

You are not you're job. 

You're enough. 

Starting is the hardest bit

I did pitch recently, it was the usual chaos, it always is.

Nothing much happens at first, around half way through, things actually began to happen.

Until, finally, the day before when all the things that could have been done weeks ago get done (someone reads the brief). 

 

It's not just pitches, it's people.

A study looked at a wide variety of industries and projects and found that, no matter the type, little get's done until after half way.

Then momentum builds towards a final panic/rush of activity/push of productivity, confusion or whatever you want to call it.

 

Of course, part of me thinks, great, I'll put my feet up until everyone else wakes up half way.

The Tour De France is on, what better excuse?

 

Except I'm just as bad at projects working alone. I suspect we all are. 

Stare at a brief, make post it notes to pretend I'm mind mapping, research that's really putting off thinking.

Then halfway, the fear of having nothing, the relief of a direction, the stress of making it watertight. 

So what to do?

 

With team projects, either purposeful procrastination or bootcamp.

Bootcamp is simple. Do the project and nothing else in two days - just put an insane deadline in.

The problem with this is working against how the brain performs best. 

The subconscious is genius and works through all sorts in the background - as long as you feed it, that's where flashes of insight come from.

They are not bolts from the blue, they're connections the subconscious clicks into place.

Ideas happen slowly and all of a sudden. 

 

So I say use the time wisely.

Relax, read, find reference, talk about it, write the odd note, read things that might be a parallel.

Don't sit on your arse, feed the subconscious. 

Then when half way comes, it will oblige you with gold. 

 

Then again, sometimes you're up against it and you need quick  as well as quality.

Here are some ways to jump start, jolt the brain into action and out of it's comfort zone, mostly by shaking up the process.

Most are useful workshop techniques - don't shout, a workshop on yourself just means not having to endure groupthink.

Or 'there are no bad ideas'. There are. 

So...

Write down the wrong thing to do, then try and make it work.

Write down the wrong thing to do, then do the opposite.

Write down the obvious solution, pick your favourite film - develop the the obvious based on the film..

(get people to drink more instant coffee instead of posh ground beans inspired by the hunger games - either reframe posh coffee culture as a conspiracy to get you paying more for stuff that doesn't taste different, or portray daily life as daily hunger games for instant drinkers who get shit done rather than poncing around  - you could even have a content series where team instant competes with team beans. None of this is good but I only had a minute). 

Put your brand with something it shouldn't be with, then make it work. 

Find what you admire in the target audience, where does that take you?

What would really piss off the competition?

Write what the competition could do to stop you reaching the objective. What will you do about it? 

Read something odd and outside your comfort zone - why is it interesting? How could it help solve the brief? 

What is the competition's strength? How do you turn it into a weakness.

My favourite - what is the real emotional truth in the category or the problem?.......

Few companies really understand what they mean, or what they could mean in real life, they forget to make people care.

All Nike does is show how sport can make anyone feel better about life, no matter how average of miserable they are.

Most countries tense about immigration would stop working without it (UK racists love a good Indian takeaway, a German supermarket took away all imported or non-traditional German food to proved the point). 

Dove know that beauty is supposed to make women feel good, not bad. 

Coffee makes the daily grind more bearable.

Ikea in the UK knows it's the little things that make the biggest difference to our daily lives.

They knew that Christmas is a stress because your private home is on show.

Men buy women flowers to pretend to be thoughtful (so Interflora should coach them to BE thoughtful in real life too).

More and more men do extreme sports to feel they have some agency in a world that leaves them feeling powerless.

Men like football because they wouldn't be able to talk to each other otherwise.

Anyway.

 

Starting is hard.

Work with the halfway rule, not against it.

But when you need to start, jolt your brain by workshopping on yourself.

Hope it helps.