Having planned on most communications media I’ve been forced to think through how planning contributes to the different disciplines and in particular how planning should be deployed to integrate the disciplines together. In the process of which I have come up with what I call a new playing field for planners.

Here’s the simplest way to explain. Take 3 brands BhS, Uncle Ben’s Rice and the Daily Mail.  All 3 are brands but the brand manifests itself in very different ways.  The FMCG brand is built around the promise of the product, the retail brand is primarily built around the service or the actual experience it offers.  The Daily Mail brand is manifested in its ability to function as a medium; the audience it delivers to advertisers determines its commercial value.  As I have become more and more involved in integration I have seen that each and every brand has all of these facets.  Every brand embodies a set of values and benefits.  Every brand has a unique set of experiences that customers and prospects experience. And every brand is a medium.

1.      Brands are promises or assertions that are typically made through advertising. The aim is to alter attitudes and salience.  The natural territory for this is the consumer’s mind. This is the area where advertising planners work primarily to add value to the creative product – the primary area in advertising where value can be added.

2.      Brands are media. Ad planners are less aware of this because advertising borrows other people’s media.  But every brand has a constituency of prospects and customers who form a medium.  DM planners add value to the DM product primarily through improving targeting – the critical factor for success in DM. 

I make use of my DM background to business case who will respond, what they are worth and how much it costs to attract and hold onto them

  3.       Brands are experienced - this is the facet where every brand is a service brand.  Planning on sales promotion and latterly the internet needs to add value in terms of mechanics rather than creative work or targeting.  The objective is to shape and change consumer behaviour.   This kind of planning requires very different research methodologies to those used for the brand as promise.

Conventionally, advertising planners concentrate on understanding the consumer mindset because they worked with advertising in area of the brand promise. They function as psychologists within the agency team

And Integration is about using the (by now) scarce and stretched resource of planning to feed the entire account team. If the planner does not understand what is required by the different communication disciplines they will provide the wrong product at the wrong time. The benefit of an integrated planner is that this person functions as a glorified midfielder serving all parts of the field and holding it together. Go to the integration area where I provide more detail on the planning process for integrated campaigns.