Digital vs Analog Creative Brief - Different Key Questions

This is a slide shown at an APG conference in Germany. It features different approaches to planning of Digital and Analog disciplines. Basically, there is nothing new, but a lot of symptomatic stuff to say about it. But first of all, let me translate briefly into English. This scheme juxtaposes Key Questions to be answered: 

Analog: What is the consumer's motive (to buy/use)?, What is the message of the brand/ad? Why should she believe us? How do we stay recognizable? How do we gain attention?  

vs.  

Digital: What is the user's behavior (in the digital space)? What is our offer/experience? Why should she take part? How do we make space for sharing & for new stuff to be created? What do we offer to make them spread our story?

While this really is a helpful introduction into basic differences between digital planning (experience planning) & analog planning (brand planning), there's a gap that always strikes me. And I mean not the one between digital & analog but the one between digital & purchase. The digital planner - at least according to the scheme above - does not explicitly ask herself how the digital experience connects to purchase or usage motivation for the PRODUCT to be sold. It starts off with the question about user behavior in the digital media space rather than in the product usage space. Of course, some digital experiences are directly related to purchase or usage like it is the case of e-retailers, airlines, etc., but clients like e.g. detergents, burgers, canned soups, etc. are not used or even bought online. So how would this kind of planning actually plan for purchase?

The major challenge for digital planning is to show how this non-message- & non-motive-approach is connected to purchase. Classical brand planning or account planning connects to purchase via a model of consumer motivation which the communication tries to evoke or to alter. What is the purchase influence model used by digital planners? I'm sure there is one - but has not been formulated clearly, yet. Up to now it seems that the mere fact of brand exposure & experience as such is supposed to drive propensity to buy. This well may be the case but on the other hand it would mean that it makes almost no difference what exactly the experience elicits in the minds of the users as long as the familiarity with the brand increases. In other words: "As long as people are engaged in any kind of experience - it sells". Is this true? Has this been researched properly? This is a big opportunity for academic studies to come. 

Communication objectives that help and those that don't

Why objectives are important

Objectives give direction.


Giving direction is crucial for marketing and communication strategy. It's obvious why:
1) it helps people understand, what they have to develop in terms of ideas & actions
2) it provides a basis for evaluating the success of those actions.

Now, as a planner I have been searching for an answer to the following question for a long time: How to set objectives so that they help people to develop their marketing activities? A simple question - in theory.

Common but futile knowledge:

Most of the pieces of literature and informations on the internet I've found refer either to the notion of SMART objectives (see graphic) or to the difference between marketing and communication objectives. There's nothing wrong about both of these notions. But they did not really help me. While I was mainly developing communication objectives with marketing objectives already set by my clients very I rather wanted to know:
A) how are communication objectives set best = so that they help?
B) how can communication objectives be derived from marketing objectives or "goals"?

SMART doesn't work very well:
A) I tried to apply SMART criteria to  communication objectives - e.g. in a creative brief. This was not wrong, but it was not the right thing to do as well. Why?

Yes, "Specific" is crucial, "Realistic" is important, "Achievable" is great, but things get worse for most planners when they come to "Measurable" and "Time-Bound". The problem about these criteria is that they seduce the planner's brain to think quantitative. The next thing that happens to a lot of people is that they state the communication objectives in terms of impact on certain dimensions tracked by the brand management. Most often these are brand awareness, brand likeability, brand preference, certain - not insightfully chosen - image dimensions etc. Again,  this is not exactly wrong - measurement is good - it just doesn't help to understand what exactly to develop! What would help is to know The How of "Achievable"! "How can we achieve whatever needs to be achieved?" is the question creative and account people want to be answered - and they don't care, actually, about the market share or brand awareness figures. Why should they? These don't help them.

Marketing goals don't help much:
B) What about deriving communication objectives from marketing objectives? It happened to me - so I guess it happens to other people, too: I really believed for a while this might be possible. It is not! Why?

It's simple: because marketing objectives in most cases are built as SMART objectives and focus on the evaluation of actions. There's no way to derive a helpful communication objective form a marketing objective described as "increase market share to 45% in the SME-segment in the next 12 months". The only things you can derive from such objectives is the target segment and the offerings to be marketed. This helps you to conduct market research with the right respondents or to buy the right media and target the right people at the right time. But it doesn't tell you (directly) what kind of communication and message is needed. Now I believe that there's no direct if-then-relation between marketing goals and communication objectives. Not even the slightest! But there might be one between communication objectives to be set and the problems ON THE WAY TOWARDS the marketing goals proclaimed by the client.

Conclusion & Proposal:
Overall I learned that there seem to be two types of objectives: those to evaluate how things went in retrospective and those that really help a planner.
The problem is: nobody will tell us the objectives. We have to set them ourselves. But the questions remain: how do they have to be if not SMART?

I believe that one of the simple ways to think in a more helpful way is to ask "what to change?" instead of "what to achieve?". Even if it's true that sometimes change is not required, still this perspective helps in most cases when planners are involved.
I believe that choosing a certain form of statement helps a lot. So here are some useful ones.
A communication objective is more helpful when it is stated e.g. in the form of
"from ... to ..." or "convince them that ..." or  " or "dissolve the connection between ... and ... ".

Branding vs. Communications Planning

Sometimes people don't quite get the difference between a brand strategy as fixed in a brand book and a workable idea for communications.

"We had that whole brand thing already with another agency. Some brand guys - Soandso and Soandso. So we know perfectly well what our brand is. We have to use what the brand bible says. So why are you telling us we need a real idea, now. Are you crazy? We have it already."

So this is how I once tried to explain why there are two views on "doing the brand thing" and why the brand book doesn't always give you the strategic campaign idea - not even for an image campaign. Not always? I mean almost never.

The Mechanisms behind Emotional Propositions in Advertising (2)

A quick follow-up on my post on emotional propositions and why they might be good for. I just found this interesting insight from McKinsey. Sorry, the pic is in German. It basically says that emotional beats rational in the consideration phase of the "lifecycle", whereas rational rules in the purchase phase. The curve is not the same in each product category, obviously. This one here is calculated for health insurance.

                                                                    read the old post here:

How to Define Problems

Sample text from the article:

"1. Rephrase the Problem. When an executive asked employees to brainstorm “ways to increase their productivity”, all he got back were blank stares. When he rephrased his request as “ways to make their jobs easier”, he could barely keep up with the amount of suggestions. Words carry strong implicit meaning and, as such, play a major role in how we perceive a problem."
(click here to read full article)

Paul Laffoley, The Mad Überplanner

Source: Uploaded by user via Kirill on Pinterest

"We need more Target Group Engagement?"

Single-minded Propositions vs. Brand Sustainability

I got inspired watching a documentary about the nature of money & currencies. An economist who develops new currencies for the world quoted an insight from sustainability research:

"While efficiency is highly appreciated in our world, it's not very good for the sustainability of a system if it goes too far." In his field this means that different, only partially exchangeable currencies would make the financial systems more sustainable and crisis-resistent.

So I just transformed the diagram he has drawn to explain this into one that is rather about brands and their sustainability. So if we see brands rather as "meaning systems" and not as "meaning points" the curve goes like this:

Brand sustainability is highest when there's enough diversity in the brand's "meaning layers". Single-mindedness as an absolute goal of brands kills them in the long run.  


Well, obviously, this is merely hearsay and just a hypothesis. But it's nice to see it as a simple curve.

Tell me what you think...

Strategy as seen by creative people?

Sinus Milieus in Germany

While all planners in Germany have seen the graphic of the new Sinus Milieus very little is really known about those new clusters. Maybe this transition chart I found on the net helps a bit. However, the Sinus institute definitely needs to explain all this in more detail and also in a more scientific manner.

Brilliance of the 30-Second Spot

So Contrarian, AdContrarian!
Brilliance of the 30-Second Spot

Strategy Quotations - Marketing Warfare

"The key to marketing warfare is to taylor your tactics to your competition, not to your own company."

- Al Ries/Jack Trout in Marketing Warfare -

Insights through letting people tell stories

In the description of their narrative based methods Cognitive Edge describe important qualities of moderating a group session. They apply these rules to anecdote gathering techniques. (link to document here)
But I believe these STORY ELICITATION TECHNIQUES & general rules for moderators are useful far beyond that:

"Extremes. People should be talking about best and worst moments, not about everyday things. What you are looking for is the boundaries of experience, not the midpoint. You are not interested in what a "typical day at the office" is like; you are interested in the best and worst days in a career spanning forty years. And importantly, these extremes must include the negative as well as the positive. It is much easier to get "success stories" out of people than it is to get stories of failure and disappointment; but it is the latter that is usually more fruitful.

Events. People should be recounting things that happened, not lecturing or giving opinions or complaining. You are looking for stories, which are a qualitatively different type of data than any other kind of statement. All stories describe events; if nothing happens, it is not a story. This is a major obstacle and one that can produce bountiful amounts of opinions, statements, facts, and instructions - but no stories. Whether you get stories or not depends on how you frame the things you ask people to do. It can be as simple as making sure to ask "was there a time you felt proud" rather than "what were your accomplishments". Always frame your introductions to natural storytelling in terms of events - times, moments, experiences, instances, things that happened, and so on. Avoid mentioning things that don't have a time element, like conditions, beliefs, rules, expectations, memory, and so on.

Emotions. In every situation there will be some issues that people are going to be at least a little passionate about. If that isn't happening you haven't found the issues yet. Sometimes it takes a while for people to open up and start talking about what really matters to them. You need to find a balance between using techniques that help move this along and just having patience and letting things take time. You can help people too much. Sometimes you will get all of your useful anecdotes in the last quarter of the anecdote circle's time. That's fine, as long as it happens.

Experiences. You want to hear about people's real experiences, not what they believe they should be saying, or the company line, or what they heard on the news. You need to cut through all that to get to what has actually happened to them, because that is where the real potential of narrative disclosure is realized. The several techniques for fictional exploration described below can help with this obstacle. But outside of any technique, you also need to convince people that you really do want to know what their experiences have been and that their perspectives are valuable to you. You can do that in how you talk about what the anecdote circle is about and why you need the perspectives the people in it have to offer. Your reasons for this will of course differ based on why you are holding the anecdote circle; but in nearly every case you will be truthfully able to say that you are after something deeper and more meaningful and signficant than what can be found out by reading official stories or news stories or instruction manuals, something that only the people in the room know about. Knowing that what they will be talking about will be valuable will help people to volunteer what they know.

Exchanges. Naturally occurring storytelling lives in a habitat of conversation. It is not a "thing" you ask for but an emergent property of discourse. Whether you get emergence or "things" will depend entirely on how you present the anecdote circle. Watch your language. Never "ask" for a story. Never tell people "we want your stories" or in any way refer to a story as a thing. If you do that, you will tap into a lot of misperceptions about what a "story" or an "anecdote" is, including a novel, a movie, a comedy routine, a lie. You don't want people to get the idea that you want them to perform or make things up for the sake of the things themselves, because the focus will shift from process to product (and thereby destroy the product). What you want people to understand is that you want them to talk together about the past, about times and events in the past, about things that happened to them, about their experiences. If that happens, there will be much better anecdotes produced than if people believe they are "producing" anything."

Touchpointing

Is Account Planning about Problem Solving?

http://www.markpollard.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Approach-to-strategy-Mark-Pollard-2010.jpg
http://www.markpollard.net/how-to-do-account-planning-a-simple-approach/

Have a look at this nice introduction to planning. It's really good. Thank you, Mark Pollard!
Look at the left of it: it is build around the notion of "THE PROBLEM". Lots of account planners stress that planners need to identify the problem first. And it works really well for lots of tasks at hand. My concern with this, nevertheless, is: I this always the case? What if it's not about a campaign that has to change attitudes - but e.g. about long lasting platforms for brands? Haven't you also encountered situations in which the work just doesn't seem to be problem based? When you might be able to formulate a problem but this would just be a verbal trick of stating something negatively? Or you would arrive at very generic "problems" like "the brand could be positioned more clearly" or "not enough competitive advantage" or "communication in this field is stereotyped, the challenge is to find new ways", etc. But these are obviously not those kind of smart problem discoveries planners are eager to find.

I personally like the problem based paradigm. It helps a lot. It helps to teach juniors for example: "Don't think solutions first. Think problems!", etc. It's a clear advise how to work and those advises are scarce in our business.
Bit sometimes I guess problem-based is wrong or rather not necessary. Do we always need a problem to get to the Insight? Do we need a Big Problem to arrive at a Big Idea? Can a lasting brand positioning always be built based on an actual problem the brand has right now? Or take another example: do we need a problem to outline a christmas promotion? Or when a brand is not there yet, its problem is so to say that it doesn't exist, yet. Is this really helpful to find the Big Insight into a Human Truth?

I would guess, problem based is right for maybe 60% of the cases given. (Don't ask me where I have this number from, It's pure guessing - and just a number. And what is "right" anyway? Probably nonsense as well..)

Read the follow-up on this post here.