Jason Oke at Leo Burnett Toronto has written a post about his perspective on planning processes, which he shared in the account planning class of the Miami Ad School, Minneapolis. It makes me happy to read posts like this. I sense hope.
In his post, Jason also points to five ‘seemingly’ obvious principles for planners. Seemingly I say because I don’t think these can be emphasized firmly enough as a majority of these tends to be forgotten in the grind of daily office madness and ridiculous time constraints. Go and read Jason’s post here.
“I guess the closest we can come to a process is to be open to things when they do happen and seeing where everything takes you.”
This is planning to me. It sums it up. And it indirectly speaks of the need to approach client briefs with gut-feel and intuition first and foremost before the left brain gets switched on to analyze, rationalize and validate intuitively driven thoughts and hypotheses. Now don’t get me wrong, planners definitely need to use both hemispheres of the brain. A lot. But as much as IQ is important, EQ which fundamentally is the ability to empathize with fellow human beings and be tuned into things around you is absolutely critical. In my opinion, it’s what makes or breaks planning and planners; it’s what decides if planning can help creatives do great work or if creatives simply want to kill planners.
The planning style of those I call IQ planners – planners who rely predominantly on left brain processing in their work – tend to find both comfort and refuge in various planning processes, most of which are preconditioned to linearity of thought. These people have a deterministic relationship with numbers and planning as a whole. To utter words such as ‘randomness’ and ‘hunches’ makes them shit in their pants. You have been warned! IQ planners invariably start working on a new brief by looking at the data available. And this is likely to be category data.
The other kind of planners, those I call EQ planners – people who favour a more intuitive, fluid and creative approach to problem solving – tend to consult their gut and they choose a more emotionally guided approach as they set out on their journey towards answering a brief. (Please note that I just said “emotionally driven”, not “irrationally driven” – these are two very different things) These guys do get down to the data eventually, of course they do, but the basic premise on which they operate, be it consciously or subconsciously, is the assumption that the data will only yield answers to the questions that have already been asked.
Presentations and documents written by IQ planners often resemble the kind of documents a management consultant produces, whereas those written by EQ planners tend to focus more on telling human stories and relate to a broader consumer life context in what they write. Undeniably, both have their place in business. However, in the communication industry where the link between brands and human emotion is what we deal in, one is indefinitely more important than the other if you ask me.
Jason is an EQ planner…..probably one with a very healthy IQ as well. Thank God for people like that!
Is there a point in this all this drivel? Well, you’ll be the judge of that. But whatever your conclusion, you may want to ask yourself what kind of planner you are?
NP
July 31, 2007
Lovely post Fred, and something very close to my heart at the moment
Jason Oke
July 31, 2007
Hi Fred –
Great post, and thanks so much for the kind words.
I’m glad you said “the majority of these tends to be forgotten in the grind of daily office madness and ridiculous time constraints” – because I also admitted to those students that I’m embarassed how rarely I follow my own advice. It’s easy in the abstract confines of a blog or a classroom to talk about how we should do things, but real life has a habit of messing up those plans. In fact, I confessed to the students that I gave a horrible briefing just last week.
But that’s one of the things I like about blogging, it’s a chance to keep reminding ourselves what’s important, and keep pushing ourselves to do better.
Rob
August 2, 2007
Freddie … you’re definitely an EQ based planner because if you were an IQ one, you’d of spelt ‘DRIVEL’ correctly.
[By that reckoning, both NP and Marcus are the most empathetic human beings in the Universe!]
fredrik sarnblad
August 2, 2007
Does spotting that typo make you an IQ Planner? No, it doesn’t….does it? No.
Now I’ll have to correct that typo.
Rob
August 2, 2007
No – it makes me an anal toad!
fredrik sarnblad
August 3, 2007
That might just be a tad better than the alternative you know. 😉
Age
August 11, 2007
Great post Fred. As a junior I think at times I struggle to understand just how much of the IQ I need to balance my EQ, so it’s good to read things like this and reinforce that there really is no right or wrong way, just whichever works for the individual I guess.
John Dawson
August 24, 2007
I would suggest the very definition of a good IQ planner is someone for whom randomness holds no fear at all. I am a big believer that we need more IQ in planning – not less. I’m from that background and most of what I see which masquerades as IQ planning is just poor use of numbers. If IQ planning is the norm then as an industry we’re doing a shocking job of training people at it.
If I ran an agency, I would ban all but the best planners from delivering IQ style messages because more often than not they are wrong.
The “putting yourself in the consumers shoes” piece that you apply to EQ planners is exactly what any decent IQ planner should also be doing. Don’t confuse schools of planners with bad approaches.
fredrik sarnblad
August 27, 2007
John, welcome to this place. If I ran an agency, I think I would actually ban everyone from delivering “IQ style messages”. Honestly. Sure, I appreciate that at times, logically sound, rational messaging is required to achieve certain communication objectives [depending on the role of communication], but more often than not, this means very little without an emotional quotient in delivery.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for IQ in planning. Tons of it. What I’m saying is that this isn’t enough. If the role of planning [and planners] were to only narrow down the strategic opportunity by a bunch of smart people, everyone in a category would end up in exactly the same place. I believe we should be generally careful of reducing the human mind to numbers alone. EQ must be part of the equation.
Rob @ Cynic
August 28, 2007
The words ‘strategy’ and ‘advertising’ should never be in a sentence together, well unless you are talking about a diluted, ambigious definition of the word ‘strategy’. And probably advertising now I come to think of it.
Alfred
August 29, 2007
Some 20 years ago, Jack LANG became the Minister of Culture in France. His first appearance in front of the National Assembly caused some raucous because he did not wear a tie, but a jacket with a Mao collar.
One of the most controversial declarations from Jack LANG was : “I love Advertising ! Advertising is Art !!!”
Maybe Advertising is not always Art (I know that… I work in an Ad Agency !) but how do Ads that create emotional responses from the public stand ?
Can you PLAN emotions or should you just let them happen ? From my experience, steering Creatives a bit too tightly in the “right” direction is a frustrating process, both for the Creatives and for the suits, who never get exactly what they want at the end (hint, they don’t “know” what they want because they are closed to the idea that they expect is something eliciting an emotional rsponse).
Maybe Planners should ad another level to their maps, describe the emotional and affective landscape of a market segment* before letting Creatives “do their stuff”.
Sometimes, hitting the emotional nerve is too easy, for example with the “kawai” Strategy for cuteness
(See: http://coolbranding.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/)
Sometimes, Creatives let their right brain take over. Is the result Art or Advertising ?
______________________
Did you notice that MPV with sliding doors just “kill” the male soul of their driver ?
No wonder why MERCEDES had swiveling doors on the R Class.