Beyond Communication: The New Mandate For Brand Strategy
A sobering remark about brand planning and strategy by Jon Steel that has always stuck with me is that neither clients nor agencies need it. And he's right. Much of the best advertising of all time was done without strategists in the room or anywhere near the brief for that matter (e.g. Volkswagen, Avis, Apple). The onus on strategy and planners is always to be relevant by contributing thinking to the problem that makes the solution better. But there has never been a more difficult time to meet this most fundamental goal. In agencies today planning, like most departments, is spread thin and under-resourced. Agencies are notorious for not selling planning properly or for giving it away, with the result that the strategic process is often compromised or crammed into unrealistic timeframes. Another, even bigger issue is that direct engagement with consumers via research, the foundation of good planning, is often not possible due to budget and time pressure or is out-sourced to market researchers. As planners we are often left to just make stuff up based on judgement, experience and what we can find online. It’s a bit like the end of week rummage around in the kitchen, throwing a meal together from left-over ingredients and what you can find in the bottom of the fridge. Sure, it is possible to come up with a strategy this way, even a good one once in a while, but you can’t do outstanding strategy consistently without understanding the people you are talking to. Really understanding them. It’s no guarantee of success mind you, but it does give you a much better chance of developing, and just as importantly defending, breakthrough strategic thinking. If these challenges sound familiar the pressure on planning and planners is, of course, symptomatic of the broader pressures facing agencies and the advertising industry.
Yet despite these challenges, and perhaps paradoxically, I believe the future of planning is bright. But here’s the rub. To realise its potential the discipline of planning needs to not just address the systemic issues above, it needs to look beyond communication. Planning can have a bigger canvas, much bigger. The future of planning is linked to the future of brand strategy. More enlightened clients are starting to realise and act upon the idea that the brand is the business. They understand that in the digital age what you do is more important than what you say. If brand strategy is to work (and to be credible) it must come to life in more than just advertising, it should inform every part of the customer experience and even beyond that to how a business does things customers can’t see. Done right, brand strategy can and should be an organising principle for a business. This is the real potential of brand strategy today and it’s an exciting mission for planning to be involved with. Having a brand idea to build from is much more directional than vague notions of becoming customer-centric and then measuring the Net Promoter Scores for progress. In fact a key weakness of much corporate strategy is that it stops with the business itself rather than going further to consider the mind of the consumer - after all this is ultimately where strategies need to work and where the battle for market share is won or lost.
Most businesses today are light years away from this type of thinking, which is why you often seen organisations with a business plan, corporate purpose and brand strategy all pulling in different directions. Organising the business (including its purpose) around a unifying brand idea is the answer, but this notion would be laughed out of most C-suites and board rooms. Brands and their power are poorly understood outside of marketing departments, which in truth haven’t done a great job of communicating how brands work or the economic and financial impact strong brands can have. The idea of the brand as a strategic weapon for the business is a corporate blind spot. Agencies haven’t helped much either - it’s only in the past few years that advertising itself has been able to articulate how brands and communication create economic value (thankyou Les Binet, Peter Field and the IPA). Planning, alongside marketing, can have a role in building powerful brand strategies, explaining how brands work and bringing them to life across the organisation. This is a big and ambitious mandate for planning but it’s the right one too. It means continuing to work on making great communication, but also lifting our sights to the bigger picture of transforming how organisations engage with consumers in much broader ways. How might a brand strategy affect the way employees interact with customers, how a store layout is designed or how a business executes its sustainability and environmental agenda? How might innovation priorities be reframed to drive a brand idea of say "Freedom" rather than some generic notion of customer centricity? Brand strategy can inform or at least influence all these things and more.
Taking the brand to the entire business will require new types of skills for planners as brand strategy approaches need a few tweaks when they are applied at the organisation level rather than just to advertising outcomes. Naturally there are bits and pieces of this broader application of brand strategy happening now in more progressive client and agency partnerships around the world, and in this endeavour most of us are learning as we go – often by trial and error. Whether this type of work is done in the future by the big agency groups or independent brand agencies and consultancies is an open question, but either way it represents and exciting future for brand strategy and for planning – one that is not linked so closely to the uncertain fortunes of advertising.