The Future of Strategic Planning: Published articles/USP Age 1

Article in USP Age

The Future of Strategic Planning:
Separate with a bang or die with a whimper


What has happened to the advertising industry as a whole and to servicing as a function will happen to planning too: its role will get steadily reduced as new fangled experts chip away more and more at its pie.

The rose bushes in planning’s vineyard: Heeding the danger signals

They say vine growers plant rose bushes every few yards or so, because potential pest infestations show up early in the rose bushes – and the vineyard can be saved.

The rose bushes in planning’s vineyards are already showing signs of danger.

Consultants have been mushrooming for quite some time now. Trend spotters are arriving by every train. Journalists and magazines are doing a great job of tracking and reporting trends in social psychology much faster than agencies ever can. There’s enough and more available on the net – marketing websites and blogs are throwing up ideas and models faster than you can say google. Understanding media behaviour, shopper behaviour and the like has traditionally not been an area of expertise of agency planners. It doesn’t help that market research agencies are not adapting fast either.

With brand messaging converging with news, content and entertainment, the relay race where planning partners the client from conception and then passes on the baton to creative for delivery is no more relevant. Worse, the agency planner is no more the sole and best source of consumer behaviour and insights, or positioning strategies. Leave alone having their own insight mining divisions, marketing companies are beginning to blog on the net directly with consumers – hunting not just for insights but product ideas and even business plans. The increasing pressure on creative to push forward on its own steam further decreases planning’s role.

Strategic planning could learn from the Indian woman.

Always used to being some one else’s daughter, wife and mother the Indian woman suddenly started asking the question: “What about me?” Not satisfied with just “role” she started searching for “soul’. And when she stepped out and started earning on her own and became her own person as it were, she not only gained more respect but also became an economic force to reckon with.

It’s time strategic planners in advertising agencies started asking the very same question: “What about me?” Planners should go beyond being servicing’s backroom boy, or the client’s sounding board, or creative’s partner or the agency’s pitch leader. Their portfolio should go beyond creative briefs and strategy and pitch presentations. They should have a body of work that belongs to them - a portfolio of their own, which has a reason to be, independently.

Why? For the simple reason that first as individual professionals it will raise their level of perceived expertise and self worth, and second, as an agency offering, it will help raise the quality and scope of contribution, thus commanding a higher price.


Re-skill, re-structure, recruit differently

Besides fresh methods to play the traditional roles, (the Indian woman does housekeep and cook more imaginatively today!) planners need to pick areas of interest and expand their skill sets to include trend analysis, strategic content creation, media behaviour analyses, business ideation/consulting, work-shopping and brainstorming, net scrounging, 360 degree research and channel planning.

New age planners should be able to hit the ground running with frameworks and models for new age categories like retail, medical, education, entertainment, commodities, travel, technology/internet, as well as be able to play a consulting role in areas like internal/employee branding, and even CEO branding.

The planner of the future must shift gears today – if he or she hasn’t already - to go from being thinker to creator, from insights to ideas, from creative brief as predominant output to content creation and tool building.

Advertising agencies should restructure and break the traditional format of having dedicated planners per client, to creating a hub of planners with varied new age skills for all clients to access.

The straight, tough, soul searching question to ask is: will clients continue to pay for someone just to oversee the research agency, hold the brand manager’s hand on positioning and write the creative brief?

The opportunity: from a department to an AOR

If the AOR for creative and media can be different, a separate AOR for (integrated) strategic planning is but a short step away. When you pay for something separately, the buyer demands more and the seller is forced to deliver greater value. For all the debate on whether or not it was a good idea to pull media out of the advertising agency, there is no denying that the client has got greater value.

The opportunity for strategic planning is to pull itself out, expand its definition, collect varied expertise, and actually be the gateway between the marketer and all other agencies – advertising, media, activation, PR, DM, digital and whatever else that springs up.

To string a few clichés together… as it stands, strategic planning is going nowhere, fast. In the long term, we are all dead. Only the paranoid survive.