If strategy is sacrifice so you make a virtue of doing without. Then how do you make sure your strategy gives you an advantage? Two ways.

1.You simplify. You concentrate on one group. Or a single benefit. Or one product. Or one use of one product.  You can always tell when a strategy comes unstuck when exceptions start to be made. Which makes things complicated. Which is a drain on your resources.So the first way to strategise is to look for the essence that you can't manage without. And stick to that.

The town I live in just out side of London has a large Italian community. Our consumption of pasta and bolognese sauce has been reported at more than 10 times the national average. So how to increase sales? To persuade the non pasta eaters to try some? Or to get the pasta eaters to eat more? Well actually marketers do follow both strategies. But for the fastest win of course you prioritise those who know and love the product.

2. The second way is to optimise. Which is to build in a feedback loop to find out what makes what you are doing successful and to do more of that. So it is even more successful. This used to be a very minor aspect within marketing communications because the distance from the market meant there was very little opportunity to refine and improve. There is no excuse now we have the internet. One of the main reasons for having good metrics is not to prove we did the right thing but to give us the feedback so we do the better thing.

A favourite example of this second was when the Walmart analysts noticed that beer and nappy sales rose at the same time at the end of the day. They discovered that this was because fathers were asked to collect nappies on the way home and were inclined to reward themselves with beer at the same time. So what did Walmart do? They moved the beer right next to the nappies. And the sales went up again (Putting make-up next to accessories has the same effect for the girls).

And that's it. That's strategy in a nutshell. You can use both approaches in the same project but probably best not to try to do both at once. Simplifying is closer to the start of a project when you are deciding what direction to set off in. And optimisation tends to be used towards the middle or end of the project to make the journey faster or more effective.

As a waggledancer you need to cultivate both your skills in simplifiying a task. And your skill for optimising it. You need to be able to do both.

Have you got any examples of your own for simplifying or optimising which dramatise these that you are willing to share?  Add them to comments

Hi there Waggledancers! Just an idea I am playing with. I've seen a number of social media presentations which stress the importance of making engagement a disciplined activity not just wandering around on the web looking at interesting stuff - which most of us to be honest don't have time for and take from other more important activities.  But having thought about a working day I started to wonder if there wasn't a way to organise it so that  in 1 hour chunks I could cover the things I need to do. Of course this is a wishlist and a morning meeting could wipe out several hours of this. But the idea is that when I get back to my desk I know what activity I should be focussing on. And it theoretically ring fences priorities which otherwise never happen.

Here's a brief commentary on the list.

9 am Innovating  I'm a morning person so find this the best time to have ideas. The first hour is where I work on projects and inititatives which require creative thinking when I am fresh.

10 am Marketing. Was it Drucker who said that innovation and marketing create value but everything else is a cost. So here's the first hour of marketing. This might be promotional activity making calls and so such. But it might be listening to see what clients and prospects are talking about. And it might be a suitable time to look at the metrics - what are clients up to and how am I doing in blog mentions and so forth

11am Important stuff. I have work to do for clients - which needs doing. Here's an hour for that.

12 pm. Urgent stuff. This is mostly emails and time dependent communications

1 pm mid day break - time for getting in touch with people, for general play and exploration. Supposed to be a bit of a break!!

2 pm Important stuff. There's still plenty to do!!

3 pm Learning. The rate of change is so fast that unless I make significant time to learn things I never get around to it.

4 pm Filing and Tidying.  Never given enough time. That's why my office is untidy and why it takes time to find files. I know where I am supposed to put them but rarely do I make time to put them there.  This could include general tidying - reading and disposing of trade press and suchlike.  But the goal is to clear space. It is also a time of day when I am less alert so is suitable for lower grade activity.

5 pm Marketing. the second hour of marketing activity for the main reason that this is a good time to make phone calls. To send out mailings which are more likely to be read as people are winding down for the day. And it is a reminder that marketing needs to be continuous. It can't just happen 1 day a month.

Do I only work from 9 to 5? Of course not. But this gives a structure to the day and ensures that I cover a range of activity and don't get stuck in one area only. I should also add that every day before 9 requires a planning session so I know what I need to put into each hour.

So there's my rainbow day. Which I am going to try. What do you suggest as an alternative and how would you choose to structure your day if you had the choice?

Rather fine cartoon about waggledancing - thanks to Simon Kendrick aka @curiouslyp for the link.

Just to say that am still rummaging behind the scenes of the site to arrange book chapters. The book outline in its second draft is with the publisher being vetted. Its rather differen from the first draft focussing rather less on account planning and rather more on the general skills required of waggledancers - aka strategists wherever they may be working. First responses are sounding very positive - it will be a far more interesting book to read with much wider relevance to insighters and planners everywhere. Keep checking this site out. We're going to start to put out goodies very soon and ask your opinion of them.

A great piece from the blog of Kevin Kelly of Wired - thanks to Jon Howard of Living Brands for this link.

The point he makes is that ants and a whole lot of other species actually exhibit intelligent behaviour. Which humans mostly ignore because we privilege the kind of intelligence we most easily identify and rate - our own. Actually ants are a lost smarter because they only have 100,000 neurons each. There's a lesson here for us. Don't try to get smarter. Figure out how to distribute your intelligence around more. You really don't need more in one place - you need to share it around. That's waggledancer thinking. 

I have been exchanging posts with the creative director and founder of Webjam - (that's two different people) about what a community is and what online environments are best suited for community formation. In his Neuromancer books William Gibson references the Sprawl which is the eastern seaboard of the USA which has turned into one big dysfunctional suburban mess. And in some ways its not a bad description of facebook - not much order and lots of people and groups of people interconnecting. 

The kind of communities I believe my clients will encourage me to put together and pay me to do so are not sprawls with random postings but quite intentional ones. Where there is a clear purpose and we get somewhere. Otherwise is it really work? What does the client get out of it and so on? Clients are accustomed to paying intentional communities for a product whether that is the product itself - outsourced - or a creative product like a campaign. Where the hours are timesheeted and costs are visible or can be deduced.  But the emerging social channels aren't like that at all. Which raises questions about how these channels can attract advertiser funding. 

What needs to change is our measurement methods. We don't rate a rugby team for their efficiency in bal handling. We evaluate by the number of fries and converstions down the far end of the pitch, their ability to keep possession and their ability to move the ball forward towards their opponents touchline. Managing the team better is about managing the ball not micromanaging the players. And in a rolling scrum it is often impossible to figure out who is holding the ball and who is moving it forward - it becomes a case of momentum not individuals standing in the right place or doing the tright thing. 

Social media channels work in exactly the same way.  We need to measure the forward movement of the ball - the message - not the individual movements of the players., Even a great player who reads the game perfectly - its not where he stands but where the ball is that makes the difference.  Half a century ago the equivalent was the jazz ensemble where there was a tune and choruses and people sort of took it in turns - but often played over each other and experiemented with different scales to take harmonies to their absolute limit but the whole thing hung together in a way that was totally compelling. Somehow we need to keep the jamming metaphor central. As a musician I am always worried that a 'jam' will turn into a 'noodle' where there is no discipline, no commonality and people do their own thing. But a jam is worth striving for because to get a completely programmed result you need to write a score - that isn't jamming - that's classical composition.

Measuring productivity is tough because online I may be participating in many different jams at once - which take minutes, hours or even days to play out. But the outcome is never predictable - we know where we're trying to go with it and one of the main goals is to aggregate an audience which if we're interesting enough we can do. And keep them jamming with us.

The biggest change is that it probably means that the marketing client is going to have to change their budgetary planning to something like a casino tale. The marketing budget becomes chips - and they place chips on different games- lots of them.  Which for clients used to spending 5 million with the stroke of a pen must be sheer terror. All that decision making with no idea what you're going to win at the end of it. But what marketing has been missing out in recent years is the gaming element - business leaders have been building global businesses with marketing as a cost centre following in their wake. This is a chance for marketers to get back into the game and to show they can play for high stakes and win.

For the rest of us what we need to learn is how to keep the ball moving and prove we are jamming not noodling. I'm still working on it.

I got a question about this via Twitter yesterday and after sounding off on the topic thought you might find it interesting. It is certainly relevant to Brand peletons because it expresses the simple truth that people don't choose an individual brand immediately but hold a shortlist in their heads. The construction, structure and use of this shortlist needs to fit with your promtional strategy. This is what I wrote.

Next is the spread in the repertoire. Funnily enough if the punter is looking for a car and say they want reliability they don't pick the 3 most reliable models - they will go for a spread of drivers to broaden out the choice - again part of the delaying process and to keep their options open - its is almost like a process of triangulation. Pick 3 high spec cars and its quite hard to choose between them - go for high spec vs comfort of ride etc and you have a fight on your hands. And the purpose of brand consideration is to help make decisions - not a rational process and not one of binary elimiation of branch after branch - humans don't optimise they excel in general problem solving. I got this from the Mental World of brands  book which has quite a lot of useful material on brand consideration and how this relates to brain structure - but don't ask me to quote chapter and verse.

Next is the hierarchy. Usually there is a hierarchy of my first option, second and so on. So if you have a basket of 4 brands you haven't got a 1 in 4 chance for each brand - they are arranged in a rough priority.  I tend to work on the basis of an exponential scale - like richter or decibels. The one which is the notional top ranked is twice as likely as the second which is twice as likely as the third. (This by the way is useful when trying to determine how likely your agency is to win a new business pitch. Use an exponential scale! Which is why big brands tend to make safe and reassuring noises and smaller ones go all out with a much more differentiated offer becaues they are so far behind they have everything to play for.  If there was an even chance the brands would behave very similarly but in reality the outsider is rewarded for breaking rules the market leader rarely so.

Using brand consideration thinking the job is less to get the sale than to get into the basket to begin with and to manoevre ones way to advantage inside the basket. The sale is the final putt - not the drive. By which time you should have done most of the important work.

I'm not sure how much of this is will be of use to you since it may be that you just want to look at brand consideration as a consumer issue to be researched and tracked whereas for me it is a live marketing issue. Marketers get your brand into the consideration basket. Don't just bang on about being the number one choice.

To answer your specific questions - different market sectors will have different levels of consideration because the length and complexity of  the purchase process and the size of the basket the customer is prepared to construct is going to be different. And moving it forward to advocacy is a whole new board game we'd have to talk about.  Because that is going to relate to the quality of the experience -  there is a feedback loop.

I first applied the term Culture vultures to those who look at markets through the culture end of the telescope: semioticians, anthropologists, discourse analysts culture analysts all. The market researcher works at the sharp end - understanding an individual's motivation and extending this out to segments and market populations. Until yesterday I had not become so aware of the fundamental difference not just between the one and the many but the difference between scavengers and raptors. Not to be rude to my culture vulture brethren - they don't need real people to study them. They can use magazines. TV programmes, social contexts, transcriptions, movies, blogs and websites as quite proper human artefacts to study. Researchers on the other hand always want to ask someone What do you think? Why do you think that? Which makes them raptors - not the Jurassic Park variety but birds of prey who always eat a fresh kill.  

It is a crucial distinction because the world is filling up with human artefacts which has made decision support activity quicker and cheaper - and research is under threat. I would say though that research abandons the principle of live prey at its peril. There are many ways of analysing artefacts many of them mechanical. Research will continue to be time consuming and more expensive than the alternatives. But it will also continue to have a role. There is only so much you can do with artefacts - without a deep understanding of motivation - you just don't know why that blogger chose to express themselves in that particular way.  

Elsewhere I have described offline traditional research as cultivation when online research techniques are closer to hunter gathering. I still think that but would add this corrollary - that researchers will not go out and collect just anything. What they collect needs to be subject to theory and method.  The culture vultures have their theories too but these don't require a living subject. Research does and long may it continue to do so. 

An interesting way to start 2009. I am indebted to herdmeister Mark Earls for forwarding me to this article. In brief bees get a kick out of waggledancing - it makes them feel valuedby the community. So much so that if you give them illegal substances they carry on waggledancing even if they have no nectar to report. Why and how a research scientist decides that the frontiers of knowledge can be rolled forward by coking up bees I don't intend to speculate on. Nor what the effect on the honey might be!

 But my thought for the day is the danger of signalling that we're onto something when we haven't got a solution yet. Its a reminder that the desire for recognition is strong - stronger than being truthful. Crazed for recognition we can do strange things. So worth doing an internal truth check - am I onto something or am I trying not to rock the boat?  

Have a look at these two films - both about the way agencies work. What is the difference between them? Well apart from the wisecrack that one agency seems to have far too much to do and the other not nearly enough.. Gwen Yip's ingenious film comes across as a series of confrontations.

Which is why I prefer the flow of the second ..silly as it is.

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.

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.

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.