A while back I wrote a paper to enter the ADMAP Future of Planning contest.
I was shortlisted, which was nice.
You can and should check out the winning papers. They are awesome and wise.
Nick Hirst [DARE] GOLD wrote an excellent paper on the division in strategy and how [user] Experience Planning provide a model to both understand behavior and architect holistic brand experiences.
His perspicacious analysis of the strengths, and corresponding weaknesses, of brand planning ['conceptual planners'] and media planning ['practical planners'] is enlightening and rings true to me, having been on both sides at various points. If you have a hammer etc..
[As an aside
{I feel like it's been a while since I've been paranthetical.}
– I think everyone who works in advertising should spend time working at the other side of the fence if they can: creative, media, digital whatever. It really helps.
We need polymath thinkers to build holistic solutions in complex times.
Also we'd probably be more forgiving and less prone to fundamental attribution errors.]
Tom Woodnut SILVER wrote about Mutuality Planning – that the job of the planner is to broker a mutually beneficial solution – an equitable value transfer – between brands and people.
[He kindly credits a [poorly titled] post from TIGS back in 2006 as something he drew on.]
Phillipa Dunjay BRONZE wrote that in a world where data mining will be able to predict who buys what when, the role of the planner will no longer be to mine for insights,
[Remember – there's no such thing as an insight - they are a kind of reifed strategic currency we use as an industry, no doubt useful but not technically that kind of noun, there's no THING called an insight, insight describes a quality or process of developing a deep and intuitive understanding of something.]
[Once the square brackets come out it's hard to control them.]
but instead to find and foster microcultures around the brand for ongoing development.
I'm aligned with this thinking.
The issues of strategic fragmentation are important and structural – we have created them ourselves.
The impact of technologies will continue to change, well, everything.
Dynamic data definitely impacts the Platonic ideal of insight in some ways. Vocal communities of the interested, if you can find them, are our allies.
[See earlier caveats re: insights and square brackets]
The questions I was reaching towards are, perhaps, epistomelogical.
How does advertising work? How do we make [purchase] decisions?
How do we know? What if we have it wrong?
It's something I've been thinking and writing about for a couple of years, which is why it references a bunch of previous stuff I've published for discussion.
There has been lots of interesting experimental work in this area, most importantly by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, captured beautifully in his magnum opus Thinking Fast & Slow [this is required reading, no excuses.]
The dynamic interactions between System 1 and System 2, or the unconscious and conscious if you like, and the impact that non-conscious elements have on decision making, have led scientists to dub this 'the new unconscious' [to distance it from the largely dismantled Freudian repression model of the subconscious or ID].
This is not to be reductive – clearly what we think has an impact on what we buy, but it's far from the only driver, nor is it, seemingly, the most important.
In fact, some go as far to describe your experience of consciousness as an epiphenomen – something is being created by something else, rather the author of our actions.
This directly challenges the fundamental model underlying advertising: AIDA.
So… that's something we should probably be thinking about..right?
I tried to map out some approaches based on the science as I understand it, borrowing heavily from Feldwick and Earls and Kahneman and Heath and Watts and lots of other people.
Since part of the role of planning is to bring rigor to communications – to inform and help the work, work, – it occurs to me we also need to be thinking, more than ever in light of this stuff, about HOW and WHY it works.
[The role of strategy is to decide if we need any advertising, but that's another discussion.]
In fact, here you go – here's the paper. Forgive the title.
Download Choose the Future – Faris – ADMAP prize
I would really love your thoughts here – our explorations are just beginning.
I was very recently gladdened to read that I'm not the only person to suggest that Kahneman's work challenges the very fundamentals of advertising.
One of the smartest minds we have – and definitely one of our most eloquent – Laurence Green, formerly of Fallon London and founding partner of 101London recently wrote this in his Telegraph column.
Professor Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work debunking the myth of rational decision-making that underpins so much of the “dismal science” and, indeed, broader government policy.
Ten years later, his thoughts are finally lapping at advertisers’ shores.
The implications of Kahneman’s lifetime’s work, now summarised in his best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow, are as challenging to the advertising orthodoxy as any ponytailed art director’s more intuitive pronouncements (and, note well, they actually turn out to have much in common).
….
But, faced with an audience of advertisers, he couldn’t help but dispense a little impassioned advice:
“You must recognise that most of the time you are not talking to System 2.
You’re talking to System 1. System 1 runs the show.
That’s the one you want to move.”
And it is here of course that his groundbreaking thinking butts against much ingrained marketing and advertising practice, which still adheres, consciously or otherwise, to the notion of “homo economicus”, or rational man.
Too many advertising briefs still set persuasion as their goal and modus operandi, tacitly assuming that the consumer can only be argued into desired behaviour.
They spring from organisations that “think slowly” (because no one ever got fired for System 2 thinking) but should, of course, start with the consumer, who, in most categories most of the time, is making choices impulsively.
Kahneman’s myth-busting also lights a bonfire under many of the advertising industry’s prevailing research methodologies, especially the rigidly structured quantitative variety. The very nature of “testing” creates conditions for System 2 responses when the category will actually be shopped to System 1.
Kahneman makes no prescriptions for the advertising industry, but his provocations should be taken up and debated by all responsible practitioners.
Thanks Lawrence!
Let's debate.
6 responses to “Planning the Future of Planning”
Thanks for the link to the no such thing as an insight paper. I missed this last year. It’s excellent!
……….and UXD and Brand Planning, today they are definitely merging into a hybrid discipline. It’s an exciting time.
Hello!
Pleasure mate – Farrah is awesome.
And indeed! we live in exciting…
rock ON FX
Hey Faris,
Dare I say it — an insightful morphology on planning for the future.
Props
Hey Faris,
A thought provoking read and good to see your essay.
Firstly on ‘insights’ – I agree it’s not a proper noun. But it’s probably the easiest shorthand for defining what for me is asking ‘Why? Why? Why?’ until you can’t reduce it down any more. A revelation might be a better term – something that was hidden before, that opens up the unconscious thought behind what people do.
Which ties neatly into Kahneman. As I mentioned, I’ve also been reading Thinking Fast and Slow. It definitely has some profound consequences on how we produce advertising that actually works (quantifiably?), that appeals to an emotional and unconscious state that we often post-rationalise later.
It is definitely in early stages though – we have names for principles such as loss aversion and over-optimism now – but application is trickier. In some ways, such sense trickery has been around for years: whether the nostalgic smell of baking bread in supermarkets or photographing products next to smaller objects so they look bigger.
So while I’m very interested in the psychology/behavioural economics side, I think the role of the planner will be to build on these scientific insights, to carry out micro experiments with brands to see which successfully trigger us.
Why I am interested in microcultures is that they are a small community that has arisen to fill an unconscious need or desire. In the same way, that you might identify an illness by its outward symptoms and then work out the cause, you can look at what outwardly happens in society (or preferably niche societies like microcultures) to study the underlying unconscious cravings of people. For a scientist, an observation of a small group of subjects provides a general hypothesis. For a planner, observation of microcultures provides similar general insight.
Where I wanted to put the planner of the future was in a more cultural role – the growth of data will do an increasingly good job of audience analysis, auto-targeting ads and optimising. But automated data can’t explain the key to why people buy or create the emotional narrative to keep them coming back.
– Philippa Dunjay
Hey dude
Hope you’re well
Whilst I was at DDB we were lucky enough to have access to Dr Daniel Müllensifen (Professor of Neuropsychology at Goldsmiths, London), who was helping the planners develop a better understanding of how communications work from a psychological perspective.
Most of what he covered can be found in this book: The Psychology of Advertising Fennis, B. & Stroebe, W.
(… or just let me know if you want me to fire over any of my notes / decks, etc).
Anyway, glad to see that there are planners picking this debate up and moving it forward. Clearly our understanding of Cognition and Communication needs reviewing! Plus I think it’s awesome that Philippa is picking up the third piece of the puzzle, Culture. A better understanding of these three areas is vital if we’re going to define the role of planning in the future (or perhaps this is the role!?)
The dominant model of our industry today is built on the premise that consumers are asocially individualistic, reacting to a message that engages at a System 2 level.
However, all the evidence points to the contrary: We’re groups of humans meta-communicating and reacting to one another on a System 1 level (which includes how brands work).
So, that’s the challenge. Who else is up for it?
D
Hello there!
thanks so much for your comments!
Agree – i think of insight as both the process, the springboard and as a kind of strategic currency we use to pay for ideas. Whenever there is shorthand, whenever language is being warped, we should remind ourselves to pay attention/
Now then! yes and yes! agreed. It’s really hard. I also read your post about it.
But, at most simple, abandoning the idea of messaging and persuasion is something we must tackle. At some point.
Actions not utterance. etc.
And I love your micro culture thought – both collaborative and experimental, marketing with, not at.
Def on culture – I like HOLT here as you know – let me know what you think of Culturematic.
The challenge being balancing the inherently experimental nature of Culturematics with scale and business value and the conservatism thereof – strategy helps clients make money with creative people.
Rock ON FX