New Playing Field
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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. 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
But when I work in direct marketing I need to work with the medium – the client’s own medium not other peoples. So I need to be adept at quantifying your audience, determining their value, increasing their value and working out how little it cost to do so! I become the consumer accountancy function within the team.
And this
is how I trained up junior planners – they needed to develop in all
3 areas – they had to be as good with numbers as they were with moderating
groups. They had to be able to do this before they could work on integrated
business. Otherwise they wouldn’t know where to stand and where to
add value. 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. And here's a few downloads you may be interested in:
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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
When
I work in the area of how services are delivered and experienced I have
to function as a behaviourist. I become a private investigator, a people
watcher. I need to understand what scripts people are using when they
interact with the brand and how the script can be amended. 
