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.

Technorati Tags: planning, planningness, SF, strategy, tools

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