Because I’m not very good at the job I read a lot.
Mostly stuff that has little to do with planning, brands or marketing.
Partly because everyone else reads the same industry books and such.
Mostly because ideas are really re-combinations of existing things.
So, the wider the raw material, the better chance of an idea.
It’s like an atom smasher.
The harder you push things together.
The more you’ll find undiscovered things falling out.
Soon you’ll find yourself avoiding quoting ‘How Brands Grow’.
No need to go on about the IPA Databank.
You can quote all sorts from real life, not the made up marketing one.
It can be as simple as looking a little sideways at a brief, the category or the industry.
Or having a massive mental scrap book to pull on.
Looking at things way a planner or marketing folk don’t.
For example, if you haven’t read ‘When’ by Daniel Pink you should.
It’s a very well researched book on the power of timing.
Some great stuff on the power of breaks and when you’re at your best in the day.
For most of us, the difference in mental performance, between am and pm.
Is like the difference between being sober and a little drunk.
But a 12pm power nap can make all the difference.
If I was Kit Kat, the ‘Break Brand’ I’d be campaigning for pm Power Naps.
Power naps are even more powerful if you drink caffeine just before.
You wake up like Popeye just after he’s eaten spinach.
Nescafe could lean into this, or Nespresso.
Instead of paid social that interrupts, it could be time targeted to go with life’s flow.
Next thing Kit Kat or Nespresso target the lunch break scroll.
But also, the brain needs time to wake up before your first coffee.
If you leave it an hour after waking up, it makes a massive difference.
So coffee brands could target the bleary eyed first phone surf.
Imagine the cut-through telling people not to use you.
Or drink decaf first.
On the other hand, I read A Theory of Shopping by Daniel Miller years ago.
An ethnographic study of a British supermarket.
It should be obvious, but any shop isn’t really about the product.
It’s the experience it gives – and the people that experience serves.
So suddenly, retail, shopper and in fact anything you’re selling.
Is about how it helps relationships and the role of the shopper in them.
Even when you buy for yourself.
Shaving for example is not the ‘Best a Man Can Get’.
It’s the best a man can be.
Beyond obvious ‘don’t give your partner razor rash’.
To being the best partner.
Which oddly takes me to a book by CS Lewis on love.
(Yes the Narnia bloke).
If you take the religion bit out.
It’s about your partner being the end, not the means.
Not loving how they make you feel.
Loving how you can make them feel.
Just as a great Dad is a nuts and bolts Dad.
There to nurture and love their children as much as their partner.
You teach your son to shave.
But what else so you teach him?
To be a good man?
What else do you pass on?
Which takes me to sanitary stuff.
Thankfully showing menstrual blood isn’t taboo in ads anymore.
But that first period is one of the first steps in becoming a woman.
That parents need to help their daughter on.
Imagine reframing the first period as the end of the beginning.
I’ll stop going on.
But these are the tensions and real needs people are buying to resolve.
What is really going on beneath the surface.
Anyway.
So yes, when you’re an average planner at best, like me.
Do above average reading.
So you can connect thoughts rather than have them.
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