Since various people have described this as a blog about planning I thought I'd better mention some planning stuff occasionally.
And I've got a presentation in my head called 'Ten Things I Hate About Planning' so I thought I'd try some of them out here.
THING ONE - THE WAY WE ALWAYS TALK ABOUT HOW BRANDS ARE LIKE PEOPLE AND THEN TRY AND SUM THEM UP IN THREE WORDS
This one of those have-your-cake-and-eat-it planning habits. We're using conflicting models to talk about brands and they don't add up.
So, on the one hand, we say brands are like people. We say they have personalities. (And we do research where we get people to personify the brand.) We present them as complex and multidimensional entities.
And then, often within the same presentation, we talk about how the brand can be summed up in one word, or three words, or with a really simplistic diagram.
These two ways of thinking are clearly opposed. You can't sum people up in just a few words. Or you can't without losing some of what's essential or useful about the person metaphor.
And I tend to think both of them are too extreme anyway. Brands aren't as complex as real people (and their 'personalities' aren't that stable) but they're also way more complex than most brand diagrams pretend.
A better metaphor is that of a succesful fictional character. Someone like Harry Potter or James Bond or Bridget Jones. There's some complexity and nuance there, there's a backstory and there's a sense of coherent personality. We can imagine what Bridget or James would do in a given scenario. But, at the same time, these characters can be painted with fairly broad strokes, they're a bit cartoony. You can use shorthand. (And in the case of JB it's done very well with other brands.)
Does that make sense? That's about where I run out for THING ONE.
account planning
brands
advertising
