Stan Pollitt one of the fathers of advertising planning introduced what at the time was a radical innovation. He simplified the tangled web of market segments down to two. Users and non users.  Or heavy users and light users. This was a powerful innovation because you don't just learn by considering the opinions of a group of people. Often it is much more useful to look at the contrast with another group. So this simple initiative made it possible to look at the impact of new advertising ideas on those who already had a strong impression of the brand from usage. And those who had little impression of the brand other than through advertising. Their response to advertising would be different. And the difference was what was useful.

The communications world is an altogether more complicated place now. But these polarities are still useful. One of my first jobs when i started working in ad agencies was to work on a campaign for Guinness - alas not one of the famous ones everyone remembers but during a time when Guinness were trying to lure the fringe drinker so the advertising was aimed at them primarily -  they changed the campaign (and agency) when they worked out that the ads were putting off the core drinkers who were accounting for most (but not enough) of the volume. The new agency (O&M) came up with a brilliant campaign that reminded core drinkers why they wanted to drink Guinness. But didn't scare off fringe users who wanted to drink it more often but were intimidated by the macho associations.

So to summarise don't try to talk to everyone (not even in their segments. Look to create a bi polar order where the contrast is useful by choosing just 2 groups of people described in the simplest way. But make sure you engage with both of them. The numbers usually require you to motivate both groups, you can't afford to target just the core or just the fringe. Or the yolk and the white as Guinness used to call it.

 For today I am linking to a blog posting about Waggledancing no less which suggests that there is a conflict of interest. Despite what the waggledancer is telling the other bees - they are still inclined to go whether they last remember finding nectar. Here's the article from NY times March 25th 2008.

 And my point? Well here it is. It is a real possibility that despite whatever you say that your audience will resort to habit instead of taking onboard the new information that you give them. Knowing that what do you do? Don't go onto automatic pilot - think about what you have to do to overcome inertia. Because inertia is real. So anticipate and deal with it. You have to be more persuasive than their inertia. They have to believe there's more nectar where you are pointing than where they last found nectar themselves. That's how good you have to be.

And quote of the day comes from the blog InfiniteBody where I found the piece above written by the New York dance writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Church says: The body is a sin./Science says: The body is a machine./Advertising says: The body is a business./The body says: I am a fiesta.” -- Eduardo Galeano

A little light relief to start the week - Pee Wee Herman dances his way out of trouble after wrecking the Harleys of a biker gang. What would you say is the equivalent of the tequila moment?

 Well I guess I had one of these on a briefing for Honda motorbikes no less as a junior planner. The client mandatories for no less than 7 ad briefs were: the bike has to be shot side on. The headline was to be white out of red. Everything else was room for creative input. It wasn't the easiest briefing.  At the end of it the team looked at me hopelessly - is there anything else you can tell us about the bikes or those that ride them? (there wasn't). So I asked them Have you ever seen a black motorbike rider (this was a long time ago!) No they said - why is that? So we spent a few minutes talking about Easy Rider and On the Waterfront versus Shaft movies and how riding bikes had a totally different association for adolesent white boys. It didin't change the briefs by one iota but it did change how they felt about bikes. Which at the time was what they needed.

OK here's a dilemma I was set as acting head of planning many years ago - the planning department has 5 planners ranging from senior 10+ years, 7 years and 5 years planning experience. And 2 graduate trainees. There are 3 offices 2 with 2 desks and 1 with one desk. How would you arrange the planning team to get the most out of them?

Pause for thought.

This was what was suggested - that the most senior planner gets the small office (being by yourself is the privilege of seniority) - and the rest get bundled into the 2 remaining offices. My recommendation (which was accepted) was to put the two most senior planners in a double office apiece each with a graduate trainee. And the planner with middling experience got the solo office.

Can you see why? Organisations very often arrange themselves around status. But this doesn't make for good training. The graduate trainees would learn much faster working opposite the most senior planners. So the priority is to give the most junior as much experience as possible. The solo office went to the planner who needed the least supervision. Which raises the capabilities of the entire department - it would have been nice to have had my own office. But that wasn't the point!

The other value of this decision was the signal it sent to the planners in the department about what was important. And how much support planners could expect from within their own department. Good for morale too.

If you want to get the best reception for an idea you are briefing - then find a neutral place to do it. Far too many briefings happen in the territory of the person doing the briefing or the territory of the person being briefed. This doesn't make for a free exchange of ideas - you're either telling someone what to do - on your territory or you go on their territory to ask them a favour. Typically your own territory will contain objects which symbolise your power and your achievements. Theirs will do likewise. The big danger is that you get more of the same. Soo go somewhere neutral. It could be a meeting room but most meeting rooms are unbelievably bland - designed to make statements about those whose meeting it is and those who they want to impress - but they are neutral.

Much better is to go somewhere different or surprising where those meeting won't feel too uncomfortable but can't stay thinking in a rut. My favourite briefing place is an icecream parlour. I stole this idea from Richard Gilmore of Insight International who researched doctors ( a notoriously difficult group to get to lighten up in research) by taking the chairs out of the room so they had to sit on the floo. And handing out small pots of icecream but providing no spoons so they had to use their fingers. You can't maintain dignityand control in that sort of situation. You could choose a museum or an art gallery. Once you stop thinking it has to be in their office or yours the floodgates are open.

One other thing. A useful metric for you. Watch how the creatives leave. If they walk slowly and turn more than once then you haven't delivered the goods. They stll have more questions. But if they walk out quickly it is VERY good news because it means that ideas have started to flow and they don't want to discuss them in front of you.

This is a technique for getting a lot of insights out of a piece of research - very fast. You will need a transcription of a piece of research. Ie someone has written down what a group or what an individual has said verbatim. For this exercise you will need a rich piece of transcription not just any old part. But it might be the discussion after a key question. Get as many people as you can together and put them in pairs. Each team is a different barracuda. Barracuda combine the speed and size of larger sea predators (think 1-2 metres) with the herd instincts of piranha. Think about what the different perspectives you might want from the research. You might want to focus on the user, or on a competitor brand, or the category on a particular metaphor which is mentioned in the transcripions. Barracuda can attack from any direction. Then let the barracuda rip. Give them 15 minutes and then stand up with a flip chart and start to collect feedback. You may find that during the debrief that the feedback from one barracuda gives the other team more ideas. This feeding frenzy will generate more ideas in 15 minutes from a piece of research than just about anything else because you delegated it out to barracudas who had the freedom to follow a particular line of attack. From lots of directions at once.  Far more effective than helipcoptering out and trying to get big picture straight away.

 It doesn't stop you going back to the patient business of analysing a whole piece of reseearch. But when you do you will have a lot more leads to go on.

By far the most commonly used conceptual tool used by strategists (so common we have forgotten it is just a tool) is the humble brief.

Before a brief has been given to anyone it will already have performed a single critical job. It moved knowledge from the tacit to the explicit.  Turning something into written language crystallizes it in a way that little else does. In a strange way it actually creates it. Why? Because it forces you to organise your thoughts and to reduce ambiguity. While you are just talking about ideas ambiguity is a lot harder to pin down. Write it down and it becomes obvious if you haven't thought through what you are trying to do and if it is coherent. 

That's why you should always get a client to write a brief - because when they articulate exactly what they want in writing, it forces them to become explicit. They have to organise their thinking.

At the end of a project all that tacit learning needs to be captured - again in writing. That's why we have contact or call reports. In research this is the importance of the stages of analysis and reporting. If you don't write down what you have learned from the fieldwork- then the result literally disappears - you won't remember any of it within a matter of days. Once you have read a document or been debriefed as the presenter tells the story of the debrief, then the knowledge is arranged in a way that helps you to retain it. 

So don't look on writing as a piece of unavoidable bureacracy. But an essential part of creating knowledge. The graphic comes from a great book called the knowledge creating company - which I am sure I will have cause to mention again. You can buy it from my bookshop on the accountplanning.net website where there are a host of other titles you may find useful each of which I have read and reviewed. 

This is a workshop technique that I use regularly but the 2 questions are so vital that I recommend that any meeting you have where you want to get others involved you should use a variation of the 2 focus questions. The WHAT question and the HOW question.

When you plan the session (you do plan your meetings right?) the order in which to ask yourself the questions is as follows:

What is the core problem here? and then

How would a solution make a difference once we have found one?

The first question is always discussed at meetings usually with a pile of negativity. There is almost no time to discuss the second question.

So here's what to do.

At the start of the meeting ask the questions IN REVERSE.

By asking people to focus on the the HOW: the difference a solution would make we are giving the meeting an objective - getting to a solution. Much more important we are taking time to consider how a positive outcome would make a difference to them.  Get some kind of response from everyone involved and you will get buy in to the usefulness of the meeting - everyone will know why there are there, what they need to accomplish and what's in it for them.  You would be amazed how many meetings go on for hours and the participants may be still trying to work out what the point of the meeting is. This way you will get them on board right at the start.

It is also useful because if there are any saboteurs in the meeting the first question will smoke them out. Those who can't see the point of the meeting or are opposed to the outcome will usually be drawn to say they can't see the meeting making any difference or maybe even making things worse.  Once a saboteur is unmasked (they may not even realise themselves how negative they are) it means that their reservations can be taken into account. If you don't know who the saboteurs you can waste hours with people who are hostile and will throw out possible solutions because they don't believe in the outcome anyway.

Once you have have got feedback from everyone about question 1, then and only then turn to asking the WHAT question: what is the real problem is here. Yes there will be negativity and sometimes blame cast on individuals but within the framework you have set about the purpose of the meeting and the power of a successful outcome. So you are then able to get on with analysing the problem then finding answers.

I have cast this very strongly in a problem solution mode. But the framework can be used for any kind of discussion whether there is a formal meeting or not. To get the best out of people they have to know why they are doing it and believe they can make a contribution.  So sort out that out right at the beginning. You don't need to chuck your saboteurs out - in effect you have neutralised them by uncovering them. They may even buy into everyone elses meeting objective and start to help. If they continue to be unhelpful and this disrupts it may be tactful to remind them that they haven't bought into the goals of the meeting so can they continue to make a contribution - better if they went off and did something more useful with their time.

If of course you can't agree any positive transformation from the meeting right at the start then you have saved yourself hours! This may seem very self conscious and analytical but as the meeting leader (and remember I used this first as a workshop/brainstorm facilitator) you have received the gift of others time and attentionso you owe it to them to make the most of what they have given you.

I am working through the 3 skills of waggledancing: location, motivation and inspiration

Here's a note I got from someone who had worked for 6 months in a planning role:

"Isn't account planning as beautiful yet humanly impractical as communism?

I mean, I joined account planning after studying the job description and fell in love with its theory. In reality, it's a job that nobody else than planners respect therefore nobody cares, therefore it's useless."

I recognise a lot of myself in these comments. Planning is a great job - why does nobody else get it?And it started me thinking about why waggle dancing is so different from solitary strategizing.

I have heard other choice quotations about getting enough just experience in a planning department to be able to go freelance. The ultimate is to be a top gun planner admired by all and taken seriously. What better place than sitting in a coffeehouse waiting for the next agency to invite you in to ask your advice?  It is true that planners do tend to go freelance eventually. But the idea of the freelancer as the archetypal planner is misleading. I'll tell you who the archetypal planner really is - you can tell because it is at this stage they get the biggest % hike in their wages. It the 2-3 year old planner, with a solid grounding having worked on accounts where there is a strong marketing and branding background who can run an account on their own with minimal supervision. At that stage in your career (though no one will tell you this) you are most valuable. Because you are still relatively cheap to hire but can still ask and answer the big questions which senior people ask who are much too expensive to invite to meetings. After this point your value diminishes because your salary will increase steadily. And as you gain experience you will converge with experienced creatives, account handlers and all the rest. By the time you are at board level your value comes from how you manage people or guide the company. For planners to get senior and still be useful you have to work harder know more and think faster. But I don't think you will ever beat the 2 year old.

The power of the self starting, responsible planner comes from being bright, cheap and available in a way that senior people aren't. And this means being available to the rest of the team to challenge, inspire and listen. You will probably get to the answer first. In which case its your job to help the others catch up and to take them with you. You have a major role as a motivator. Not from above or from the front but alongside. If planning only works when you have more than 10 years of experience and can out talk and argue everybody then you will still fail to take people with you and you will cost a ton of money.

The tough thing is to earn the respect when you have no authority. So you have to use brains, persuasion and character to win the day. This is the real deal. It ain't communism. That's the kind that gets talked about in coffee houses. All the brilliant strategies that nobody else understood that no clients bought. All that is is sour grapes and the measure of our failure.   

 Have this motivated you or demotivatied you?

For over a year now I have been running a course with Mike Imms about how to generate research insights. Most of those who attend the course are researchers who are used to being briefed by clients to find insights. Some of those on the course are research managers and insights managers who know they need insights but aren't sure how to find them.  When I ran the course in Romania I even had creatives and media people coming along to learn as well!  There's something very peculiar about insights - people really struggle to find a definition of what an insight actually is. Even clients who want them can't always explain what they want. And there's a strong suspicion that the insight word is being attached to any old research finding. I want to make a T shirt which says That's not an insight that's an observation!  So one of the first things we have to do is to help people develop a working definition. Then we can go on to explain how to increase the strike rates of insights.

 I don't have time here to give you chapter and verse. But what I can do is to tell you that insights come in two ways - when knowledge changes its form. And when knowledge changes its carrier - when it moves between people.  The reason clients continue to use research companies as intermediaries is that when clients brief researchers and when researchers talk to respondents - knowledge changes form and the research project moves between carriers. Insights come out of relationship exchanges. Once you know that simple truth you know where insights shoal and can start to develop methods for catching them. If this hypothesis is true then there are 6 separate stages in the research process where insights emerge. Typically we find that no one is getting insights from more than a couple of them.So for most people there are huge gains to be made.

What if you have no money for research? No problem. The principle remains the same. Insights come out of exchanges. So work with other people not away from them. Talk to users of the product. Talk to non users. Have the users talk to the non users. Or find a middle group and have each side try to recruit them. And when you have insights remember they have sell by dates. Every insight disappears eventually when everybody believes it to be a self evident truth. So when you get an insight - implement it fast before you lost the advantage and it fades.

Virtually all marketing driven decision making is driven by what the individual consumer thinks. A whole market research industry has grown up around finding the right people, asking them questions, trying to ensure their answers are representative of larger numbers of people. Then aggregating them until you have a level of confidence in the answers. This is not the only form of decision making support. This is only the bottom up kind.

You can also start from the top with those things which everyone agrees on: language, culture, social norms - these are the object of study for the social sciences and they don't all use research to validate. This is the culture end of the market and my nickname for practitioners in this area are the culture vultures. They included semoticians, anthropologists, discourse analysts, archetypists and narrative theorists. And that's just for starters.

To give you a flavour here's a presentation from Greg Rowland with whom I have collaborated in the past. Greg is a semiotician. At a Unilever conference last month I heard a research client raving about what Greg and his team bring to the business - better than research any day he said.

Here's the link - what can we learn about the election of Barack Obama and the refocussing of the American Dream? Greg's website is here.

Let me know what you think of life seen from the top down perspective of a culture vulture - if we get enough interest perhaps we could organise a whole day on the subject.

I've got two exhibits for you:

the first is a video for IPA effectiveness

the second is the cover artwork for the best book on advertising planning ever written.

Both embody what is wrong with strategy and strategists. Its about having a giant sized brain and cracking problems by yourself. The strategist as boffin is deeply unhelpful because it only takes you part of the way there - you have to take other people with you and you have to influence the team to execute properly. 

This idea came from a workshop I ran for a major publisher earlier in 2008. I use a schematic to establish a positioning and to generate propositions. I'll post a page about that soon. The original idea was to use the tool to find propositions to reposition a product as far away from its competition as possible.  The publishing team pointed out that this was the last thing they wanted to do. If you want to sell a book you don't say there's no other title in the market like it. You do the opposite - you cosy up to your competition - because those who read the best seller like reading similar titles.

So I've borrowed the idea of the peleton from the Tour de France. Cyclists don't cycle away from each other. They cycle close.  That way they can get protection from the wind. Those following have the psychological advantage of chasing rather than trying to staying ahead. They benefit from the slipstream of the riders in front. Exactly the same thing happens when products ride in packs - the leader may not be making as much profit as one of the products further back. But is creating the profile which the others benefit from. This is category marketing by another name. To make the most of your product you need to work out where in the peleton to sit. Whether you are going to push for the lead or whether you are going to sit in the slipstream and benefit from the work of the leader or whether you want to mingle anonymously with the pack. 

It is particularly important where you have a dominant competitor - the equivalent of Harry Potter or the Da Vinci code. The biggest sellers create enough room to allow other products to come through. Pullman's novels wouldn't sell in such large numbers if it weren't for the size and scale of the Harry Potter phenomenon.  If the category is strong it also benefits the leader because it makes them look bigger and more important than they really are. All those books about the blood of the Holy Grail make the Da Vinci Code feel more substantial than the potboiler it undoubtedly is.

It is relevant for advertising because a product can benefit from the promotional budgets of competitors. Try to have a lower share of voice than your market share - that's slipstreaming. If you have competitors who spend profligately or whose ads are poorly branded then your product will benefit.