Getting the best from planning

I was asked today 'how can an agency get the best out of planning'?

I obviously have my own views but I thought I would canvass the opinions of others so asked a couple of creative directors, a number of other planners I know and our new business director.

People had various views but it all came down to three or four key areas:

• Involve them early - easy if it is an account they are working on but sometimes is forgotten when a new opportunity walks in the door. I would concur with this and let's face it there is nothing worse than getting a brief second hand or so late that the Account Team can't go back with further questions.


• Give them time - finding that insight or inspiration for a new positioning or strategy requires research, understanding and thinking. I.e. It takes time.


• Let them focus - don't ask someone to be the voice of the customer; to understand the client's business, market and competition better than they do; to be the brand guardian within the agency ... and then ask them to do that across 10 brands!

So for many agencies (who use planning as a new business tool or on just a few lead accounts) that means a simple truth ... give the planners you have the time and focus they need and if that means that you need to increase the number of planners you have then do it .... and in doing so make decisions about which clients really need, want and deserve that level of strategic engagement.

Take a Packed Lunch .... or Jamie Oliver

We met my sister, Darren and nieces at Legoland Windsor today.

Lunch time came and the choice of food for us and all those thousands of kids came down to burgers, hot dogs, pizza and quite possibly THE worst chicken burgers imaginable to man.

As we munched our way through our cholesterol busting food I pondered why there was nothing healthier available? ''They make more money from this stuff don't they" replied my 6 year old niece? Mmmm .... spot on I thought.

So if you are planning on a trip to Windsor anytime soon, my advice would be to take a packed lunch. Meanwhile, lets hope Mr. Oliver takes on theme parks as his next target.

Legoland - we deserve better.

Don't Knock The Monkey

So a report last month from TNS showed that Dairy Milk sales have been growing at less than 2%, while sales of Galaxy are growing at 12%.

The headline writers and integrated marketeers hit their stride. The Monkey on Drums ad didn’t work. And TNS had a nice bit of PR.

Now I don’t have the tracking stats but even accounting for the skew factor of working in the London ad industry bubble my instinct tells me that on the measures it should have been judged, it worked. Find me a hat and I’ll eat it if it didn’t.

So why has Galaxy outperformed?

I think the answer can be found further upstream than a single piece of communications, no matter how hairy it was.

Has Galaxy’s clearer focus on the chocoholic female market paid dividends? Is it down to their premium positioning? Or has their new product development and premium innovation machine simply done a better job?

I suspect it is a mix of both plus a few other factors so let’s not knock the Monkey. It was and is a fantastic piece of creative work. And who remembers the last Galaxy ad? Well I don’t but maybe that’s because I am not target market.

Ryanair

I had my second Ryanair experience this month, traveling with Ireland’s finest down to Sicily for a very pleasant one week break.

The first experience was a fuzzy memory. It was a journey down to France for a funeral on a plane that, if I recall correctly, was sponsored by and thus adorned with a stunning livery by “The Sun”.

So happier times and years later no sponsorship or livery – yields must be better. But what about the brand experience?

Well, the first thing to say would be that we got there and back both safely and on-time. And the flights were £70. A good £200 less than BA. Big tick!

The second thing to say would be that we were offered scratch-cards half way through the flight. And I think in that moment, there was Ryanair in a nutshell.

Scratch-cards.

B2B and Competition

I was asked today about competitor analysis in B2B markets – how do to do it and what are the challenges?

‘Interesting’ question I thought. So I polled (delegated to) the planning team and got the following response:

The first thing to say is that in marketing terms, we would never look at competitor research as a discrete activity. It is when competitor analysis is combined with real audience and category insight that we – as a communications agency – can find the positioning opportunities that create real value for brands.

So our recommended approach would always be to understand the audience and market drivers first and then work out how your brand stacks up against your competitors against each of those drivers. We tend to use qualitative research (groups / interviews) to understand the former and quantitative tracking studies to monitor the latter.

For any given campaign, our research always boils down to a Value Proposition. This is a three or four paragraph summary which articulates why ‘I’ need and why ‘I’ should buy ‘this’ particular product or service. Inherent in this is the need to explain why the offering delivers superior customer value to next best alternative. We try to find the one or two things that are most important. This is not always easy for agencies and clients to establish and requires customer value research rather than a long list of points of differentiation.

In terms of techniques for competitor research / analysis we have obviously seen a real shift to online tools and resources. We use software to track brand share of voice (positive and negative) in the ’blogospehere’ as well as in traditional / controlled channels – traditional SOV and SOV2.0! We also run tracking studies through online research panels and use shared websites to capture and share information.

One of the obvious challenges in B2B is the direct nature of much of the marketing activity. How do you get hold of the DM pack that your competitor sends to an IT Director for example? There are ways around this – it just takes a little imaginative thinking.

I guess I need to check what ‘imaginative thinking’ means and make sure our tracking activities are not crossing the boundaries into espionage!