billington cartmell. the thinking brands agency

About the Author

Neil Davidson

Brand planning needs to keep up with consumers

Rage Against the Machine's victory over the X Factor's Joe McElderry in the battle for Xmas number one is a fitting way to end the decade. That a rock fan from Essex can take on the might of the X Factor and win is further proof that this was the decade when power shifted from big brands to consumers, driven by the rise of 'my media', digital peer review and a massive decline in trust in brands. All this should be the final nail in the coffin of brand planning processes developed in the last century. Smart brands have to recognise that successful brand planning is no longer as simple as developing single-minded brand and campaign propositions and delivering them to the consumer neatly packaged up in a creative idea. 

This doesn't mean that brand planning is dead, because successful brands still need the rigour, depth of analysis and consumer insights that it delivers. The opportunity is to hang onto the best parts of brand planning, discard the parts that aren't relevant any more and bring in new ways of working that fit new consumer mindsets and how they want to interact with brands now. 

The much ridiculed brand onion and the brand key could be good candidates for the scrapheap, but the issue is more about how people use them, often as an intellectual exercise rather than a tool to get under the skin of consumers. They can still be good foundations and add rigour to brand strategies, but they have to be seen as a starting point in connecting brands and consumers, not a job to be done before leaping onto creative briefs and execution. More work needs to be done to truly connect brands with consumers, and more often.

Our approach to brand and campaign planning is to constantly ask 'what matters?' and to recognise that the intellectual leaps that come out of the planning process also have to be judged against whether they will connect with consumers – ideas have to be clever, but they also have to connect with real lives. It's also what matters at different points in the brand planning and campaign process – there are many consumer insights but what's the insight that we need to act on?  There are many smart propositions but what's the proposition that comes out of the brand, is consumer-focused and is right for the context of a campaign, where it should connect with the consumer? Effective planning needs to recognise that the brand proposition is no longer enough, and that propositions need to be flexed for different contexts while retaining the essence of the brand.

Much more planning time needs to be invested in what really matters, and developing brand activation spaces is a more worthwhile approach than ever before. This is the sort of work that more time needs to be invested in during the planning process if brands want to matter in consumers' lives. There has been a big shift in power and the brand planning process has to recognise this, otherwise more brands will lose out to the mighty consumer, just like the poor old X Factor