Back in 2008 on the 40th anniversary of planning I wrote an article for Admap about where planning has come from and where it is going. You can read the article here - because it has been provided as a reference for those submitting essays on the future of planning. I thought I would provide a progressive commentary and update to the article. I opted to take the territory of comms planning and to reject the planning triangle for once and to replace it with a hexagon! I plan to blog updates for the next couple of weeks before the Feb 7th deadline for the essay.
Starting with reputation. In the article I made the following points about reputation.
I deliberately chose the reputation word rather than brand because any marketer has to deal with the totality of the reputation of products and the company behind them. The 'Brand' word conceals this. Planners are now concerned with corporate reputation. They never used to be.
Reputation is shaped by all contacts with a company and its products. Advertising plays a significant role but not a dominant one. We need to put advertising in perspective for the powerful tool it is but not to attribute all effects to advertising.
The perceptions of non users are just as interesting as those of purchasers and customers and may have much more effect on the stature of a brand. Iconic brands are famous and valued even by those who have no intention of using the product and that adds to their desirabilty for those who do.
The category is much more important than any individual brand largely because so many impressions are unbranded so in effect category impressions. If the category is trashed then so are the brands within it. If the category is strong then it benefits all. Ergo good brand planning recognises the need to shape the category and not just to focus narrowly on the brands interests.
There is an intrinsic weakness in the advertising model which has been exacerbated by the rise of free content. And that is that ad agencies only get paid for making new advertising and that advertising isn't useful for anything else (unlike free content) Which means that advertising is disproportionately expensive as a way of shaping brand perceptions even if the good stuff is disproportionately effective in changing perceptions. Critically it blinds agencies to content which could change perceptions if they can't monetise these. It falls to new market entrants with limited resources and often no advertising budgets to build successful brands with marketing collateral and free content and without advertising. Advertising planners need to find ways of being able to build the reputations of their clients and getting paid even if this means not making ads.
There is now an increasing understanding of the cultural value of brands (not as cultural objects - nobody outside of advertising cares about that) but as containers for culture which convey convenient shorthand. Potent brands get used as culture. That doesn't mean if people talking about your brand that they are more likely to buy it. They may be using the brand because it represents something and they can use less words by referencing it - one of the cardinal errors of counting brand mentions online is not to recognise the context in which brand names are being used. It is in the interest of our brands that they become useful cultural reference points. That seems to be increasingly acknowledged and the trend towards culture brands and iconic brands is all about that.
The move towards culture has also brought in the language of brand narratives - brands constructing stories which people want to follow - this had an early dawn with the Cocacola speech at Madison &Vine a few years ago but has faded a little since. Storylines along with transmedia in entertainment are slowly taking over the language of brand consistency. My distinction is between Apollo space ships which need to be sharp and pointy for being pushed (with huge expenditure of energy) through an atmosphere: the old model of consistency and a few brand values to spaceships which stay in space throughout (of which the earliest exponent was the USS Enterprise) which could be any shape you liked. Brands therefore become clusters of ideas and associations which accrue new ones and lose old ones without regimentation - this is a much more editorial way of constructing and developing brands. The power of narratives is that characters are not static, 2 dimensional nor finished but evolving and growing.
My last point was about moving away from broadcast to shared constructed meanings with all stakeholders. One reason we use what I call a swarm analysis (getting the team to check the brand using 10-12 internet brands as a reference point). This is is part of our research development process - to get the richness of a brand's meaning which is much wider than what conventionally comes out of focus groups. A swift piece of netnography - that's what a swarm analysis is, will show you how the brand owners talk about it, what customers say about it, what retailers and wholesalers believe will persuade others to buy it. We are much more holistic in our understanding of how reputation works than the push pull of even a few years ago. Meaning is not held by the brand owners but negotiated and mediated.
Brands (but I continue to use the wider term reputation) continue to be a central idea for agencies because it justifies the sustained investment. The first generation of planners would have talked the language of campaigns rather than brands for much the same reason. Tomorrow's planners have to look big picture at brands and reputation. What they are for and how people (rather than marketers) make use of them.
I'll talk about messaging next in a couple of days
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