What Strategic Planning is about

Note : Ms JEFFRIES really liked this article

Picture yourself in a box… Would you jump out of it without a compass or at least a map of your surroundings ? That is the dilemma facing most of the creative teams in Asian advertising agencies.

The question is: Where do we jump when we get out of the box?

Starting with a military analogy, let’s imagine a highly skilled commando, mastering all the techniques relevant to the fierce marketing communication battle (copy writing, art direction, media planning). What are its survival chances without a map and a compass? How would the team find its way across swamps and the low lands, dodge machine gun fire, tread mine fields and find a fighting position allowing a clear shot at the consumer’s mind?

In a few words Strategic Planning is about drawing the map of success for Advertising campaigns.

Segmenting the population

The first part of the Planner’s mission is to understand the relationships between the consumers and the Brand the agency advertises. Consumers have their own lifestyles, values and interests. As these traits are shared y more or less homogeneous groups, the can be summed up in psychographic segments, groups that share their psychological and demographic characteristics.

Once these Target Audiences have been identified, Advertisers must take into account the Brand’s history, its personality and the features of its products, in order to understand how the consumer and the brand fit together.

Closing the gap

Let’s imagine a team of Caucasian Baby Boomers brainstorming to create an advertising campaign for NIKE sport shoes that target teenage African-Americans…

Stop laughing. The Planner’s job is also to close the cultural gap between the target and the creative team. By providing insights and bits of the cultural context of the Target audience: their language, their tastes, their icons and their idiosyncrasies. By doing so, the Planner enable the creative team to jump into un-chartered territory. That would be providing the map.

Proposing an angle

To create an ad that is compelling and relevant for the targeted consumers, an angle must be found. By producing insights of the consumer’s mind, the Planner clears the field for the creative teams. The Copy Strategy is mostly about this angle. What cultural references, what vocabulary, what tone can be used ? By processing large amounts of information, the Planners provide a tool that can be used to assess the creative ideas with regard to the objective ofthe campaign being created. That would be the compass with which our creative commando, already fitted with a map, can jump out of the box with confidence.

Convincing with facts and insights

The Copy Strategy has been translated by the Creative team into an advertising campaign concept. The agency is not even half way there. The concept must be pitched and sold to the client, a firm that most certainly has asked several agencies to compete for its coveted budget. Each agency will propose a different approach, a different angle, a different way to boost the Brand’s image and notoriety.
Although the popular image of Advertising is one of bubbling personality and borderline genius, lateral thinking is not allowed by clients. Before engaging hard earned dollars in a communication campaign, they want to know why the campaign they validate will attain the objectives they have set. The role of the Planner is to provide much needed ammunition in this heated battle. The amunition is composed of information and data that back up the creative effort and help convince the client.

The “English” Patient: The first Strategic Planner?

A literary analogy to describe Strategic Planners is the character of László ALMASY in “The English Patient”. The Hungarian desert researcher explored the western part of Egypt, reading Herodotus’ “Histories”. The ancient texts about the kings and the geography of Egypt gave him insights about the long forgotten history of the region he was exploring and mapping with the help of his English friends.
When World War two arrived, Count ALMASY’s maps and works became coveted by the Germans and the British, as precious assets to win the fierce mechanized Desert War. With planes and tanks, both very fast and requiring fuel, speeding fast forward without knowing what was behind the horizon was the best way to end up stranded in the middle of the desert at the mercy of the enemy with no hope for supply.
By drawing maps of the region and unearthing forgotten knowledge about Western Egypt, Count ALMASY was, in his own way, a precursor of today’s Strategic Planners…

Copyright – AL – October 2006