Russel Davis has a great post on how sees the future of planning:
- New planning cultures are starting to emerge, both growing out of distinct cultures (North American planning is not like British planning) and out of different thought-styles.
- The only difference is that planners are willingly abandoning their feudal overlords and striking out on their own. Mostly because they can. Their is massive demand for planning, in all sorts of businesses, within communications and beyond, and more and more of us are building the work-lifes we want to live.
- It only occured to me recently that the genius of the original brief we got from Honda ('we want to pass VW in sales and reduce media spend every year') has a natural corollary. That eventually we'll get to a media spend of zero.It's easy to imagine a business taking it's $30million media budget; taking half of it and investing it in content, retail, customer service and product improvements - and reaching just as many customers and potential customers as they had before - and giving the other half back to the business.
- As I've argued before, communications need to be complex if they're to be effective, they need to have emotional depth, nuance, blah blah blah if people are going to engage in them. But it's clear that large organisations can't cope with complexity in the management of brands, that's one of the main reasons that dumb reductive tools like brand onions and propositions remain, not because they help to make great work but because they make it easier for organisations.
Lovely stuff. Thoroughly inspiring thoughts!