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Help us create the New Planning Toolkit at Planningness.

2468518940 c26a8dc296 Help us create the New Planning Toolkit at Planningness.

Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_amanda/

I’m very excited about Planningness in SF next week. As I mentioned, me and Rob are giving one of the sessions. And in the spirit or making things rather than talking about things, we’re going to try to use our session to crowd-source the new planning toolkit. We’ll get the planners who come to help us create tools for new-marketing and new-planning. Then we’ll share them with the community on a wiki for everyone else to use, modify and improve.

For a while now, it’s been increasingly clear that a lot of the tools we use; like briefs, brand architectures, planning processes, etc. are less and less useful in helping to create new-marketing. However, over the past couple of years we’ve come to believe they’re actually worse than useless, they’re anchors which tie us firmly to the past. They were designed in an era of communications, and their output can only be communications and communications managed brands.

Great digital experiences don’t have a single-minded proposition. The most interesting brands aren’t about just one thing. There are now a host of instances and reasons why the practices of the past are completely opposed to the requirements of the present.

So, a question for you: which of the planning tools, documents, frameworks, processes, etc. do you want re-invented? Which parts of the planning/branding/marketing toolkit are the worst offenders in your opinion? We’ll be able to tackle only a few of these so I’d love your thoughts on which ones would be the most useful?

Secondly, I’m hoping that you can join us in person at Planningness to work through this with us. I’ve gone on record saying that I think planners are ahead of the curve in figuring new marketing out. The problem is that we’ve applied our learning sporadically and haven’t come together to establish a baseline of practices, processes and techniques that everyone can use. That’s clearly a much larger issue, but I’m hoping we can at least make a dent in that next week and, because I know readers of this blog are smart and well-informed, I’d love to have as many of your minds there as possible.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under 4As, brand, brands, marketing, models, strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Good luck, hope to contribute, looking forward to the outcome.
  • Your brand isn't what you say it is, it is what your customer say it is. In this spirit it feel like a brand ellipse is only helpful when accompanied by some sort of a gap analysis maybe done with the help of a social listening platform.

    The campaign launch and leave model does not work with social media. As a result digital marketing is too front heavy because it is still based on the old model of "everything has to be perfect when this prints/airs". Instead I think there needs to be more flexibility built in. Planners need to plan for change and plan for public reaction. Not sure if this is scenario planning or rapid feedback post launch.

    Battery is dying I will bring more thoughts next week.
  • -The Reasearch...is predominately led by "ask" research rather than "listen" research which outlines how people already behave and suggests what people want to use.
    -The Brief...currently demands clarity about "what message we should say" about the brand...this is all but useless in digital ideation as it doesn't help outline consumer context, technology behaviours/expectations, the opportunities to add value to their lives, the results metrics beyond "awareness" or "recall"...

    which influences
    -Platform Ideation. Agreed on the point suggested about "campaign vs commitment" or the "launch and leave" expectation of marketing. Most of our web ideas are abandoned just at the stage where you're learning about what users want and can optimize...cuz we're in "campaign" mode where big fireworks results are supposed to happen the day after launch or the idea is deemed "failure". Platform Ideation then dictates
    -Calendar
    -Budgets
    Maybe we don't need a "new" idea every quarter, maybe we should bolster good Platform Ideas that live on past a few weeks.

    unfortunately, i won't be able to attend now, but look forward to the dialog on the web
  • Sarah Saline
    The whole standard for evaluation needs to be re-thought. It's based on black-and-white "do people understand and act on the message of our brand?" when today the most vibrant brands are the ones that let people play with them. We need to figure out how to look at people playing with a brand as a characteristic of success.

    Can't make it next week but I fully expect a revolutionized planning industry before November. How's that for a timeline? ;)
  • Lachlan
    Hey Adrian- I still quite like the very simple change to briefing that we started to try out at Fallon when we split it more or less in two: The first half being a business context and reason/purpose for doing something (the 'contract' if you like), that was agreed by everyone. Creative ways to answer that business need were what we were signing-up to, not an advertising message...

    The rest of the brief that would traditionally be the focus of agreement (about all the more limiting, advertising based things like "message" and key RTBs etc), was then treated more as a stimulus area to kick start the conversation and thinking: with the most interesting insights, thoughts, ideas, facts, tools etc that the planner had identified as starting points for answering the need outlined for the business.
  • well, simply here to say: Look forward to what you guys come up with in the workshop! Cuz so far all I can come up with its a workaround; single sheet creative brief from loads of research + lots conversation with people in your team. Safe to say its a flaaaawwwwed way to get it done. And of course doesnt take into account anything outside of good old ATL campaign-jobs
  • tytobrian
    travel conflicts make the "planningness" conf a no-go; thanks for extending it from a "conf" to a "convo". don't have prescriptives for the "new" toolkit - in fact, its phrasing seems very old school i.e., "fresher" insights & whiter whites" --- but key themes any tools should emphasize -- continuity, discussion, listening, receptivity, "the loop", range and lived practice. Seriously, it all gets back to some of the original motivations re: planning and strategy for brands -- how do people make sense of a world of goods and services?
  • Karlo S
    I figured the only way for a planner to change things around, would be to become a sort of "renaissance man" of advertising. The brand problem is too big for us to be only partially introduced to basic concepts of various disciplines! While talking to my Media Director, I realized a sudden potential for this brand I worked on, and it came from "nowhere"... So, the planner needs to change herself first.

    I am unsure of its actual value, but I can see a valid reasoning behind the "tool kit" idea. Actually, having been exposed to an overwhelming amount of real-world field research practice, I figured that our planning process is necessarily going to be deduced in order to be transformed into a creative brief. Now, the problem for the most part is that the research methods are still done in a relatively "old" and familiar way, as it is the only way we can financially "justify" time spent on research to our clients. The closer I got to an individual in my target group, the less I knew what her motivation was. And I thought: "OMG!" It's almost as if it's better to presuppose or even stereotype some sort of "culturally" or perhaps "ideologically" shaped "truths", and then base the entire "planner's story" on it.
    What I'm saying is that "quantifiable" research methods (interviews, etc,) are becoming increasingly more obsolete, and that by merely looking at behavioral patterns is a better way to "truths" than talking to people about things. Herein lies the planners trap: we still have to do research to prove that what we're coming to theoretically also stands in practice. We need new research methods.
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