planning

The Operating Model That Is Eating The World

Strategy Talk

Today’s fastest growing, most profoundly impactful companies are using a completely different operating model.

These companies are lean, mean, learning machines. They have an intense bias to action and a tolerance for risk, expressed through frequent experimentation and relentless product iteration. They hack together products and services, test them, and improve them, while their legacy competition edits PowerPoint. They are obsessed with company culture and top tier talent, with an emphasis on employees that can imagine, build, and test their own ideas. They are maniacally focused on customers. They are hypersensitive to friction – in their daily operations and their user experience. They are open, connected, and build with and for their community of users and co-conspirators. They are comfortable with the unknown – business models and customer value are revealed over time. They are driven by a purpose greater than profit; each has its own aspirational “dent in the universe.” We may simply refer to them as the first generation of truly responsive organizations.
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To win in the marketplace, someone has to create and deliver exceptional products, services, and experiences, and planning won’t get us there. the emphasis on People is all about making. “Makers” are people who have skills (as opposed to credentials). They think by doing: experimenting, testing, and learning. Within these high performance cultures management has evolved into something more akin to mentorship. The thinking goes, if workers are capable of making decisions about their priorities and workflow, what’s left for the manager is skills development, knowledge sharing, and helping with roadblocks – the Montessori method gone corporate.

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Quit The Denial campaign

Strategy Talk

How to design behaviour change communications for a particularly hard to reach group, young social smokers. The Ontario Ministery of Health and BBDO used insights from the target group to guide communication. The key challenge of the brief: “how can we encourage people who don’t identify themselves as smokers, to quit smoking? This resulted in the ‘Quit The Denial’ campaign.

The campaign, which compares ‘social’ smoking behaviours to a range of unflattering and ridiculous activities (farting, earwax picking, etc.), aims to reframe smoking behaviours in the minds of the audience and wider community. It was mentioned by the CNN as this might be “the best public service announcement ever…”,

Planning for Transmedia

Strategy Talk

Presentation by Griffin Farley, strategist BBH New York with two AXE cases to illustrate the story. Nice work.

Positioning

Strategy Talk


A new interesting presentation by Helge Tenno on positioning.

Get out of your comfort zone, culturally

Strategy Talk
  • “Get out of your comfort zone, culturally. . .”
  • “Be a great listener, understand and be empathetic to the truth – who they are, their soul – and make this relevant to greater number of people
  • “The longer you work the more people want to put you in a silo, so they can define who you are by their terms. Never let anyone define you by their terms”.

By John Jay, Wieden+Kennedy, on creativity

Sweat the small stuff

Strategy Talk

Worth watching this TED Talk of Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff. It seems that a lot of organisations have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people. Big problems ask for big solutions. Better, simpler answers are ignored. He uses behavioral economics to illustrate his point his view. Great Talk.

Jon Steel about what he values in Planning

Strategy Talk
  1. Be useful. The real value of a planner is problem solving and coming up with simple solutions. Cleverness is simply a means to an end.
  2. Bring out the best in other people. Act as a catalyst for others by providing the conditions for informed creative thought.
  3. Be a linchpin, not only between people but also between brands and the audience they connect with.
  4. Have a deep understanding of human motivations and instincts.
  5. Have an experience of real life. Get out of the office to experience the real world and understand the people you want to experience.
  6. Create a working timetable both within and outside the office to best generate ideas and insights.
  7. Whether analogue or digital, the main task of any planner is understanding basic human communication.

    Source: http://invisibleinkdigital.com/

Brand Asset Valuator

Strategy Talk

Brand Asset Valuator

The Brand Asset Valuator of advertising agency Young & Rubicam measures Brand Value by applying four broad factors:

Differentiation Differentiation is the ability for a brand to stand apart from its competitors. A brand should be as unique as possible. Brand health is built and maintained by offering a set of differentiating promises to consumers and delivering those promises to leverage value.

Relevance Relevance is the actual and perceived importance of the brand to a large consumer market segment. This gauges the personal appropriateness of a brand to consumers and is strongly tied to household penetration (the percentage of households that purchase the brand).

Esteem Esteem is the perceived quality and consumer perceptions about the growing or declining popularity of a brand. Does the brand keep its promises? The consumer’s response to a marketer’s brandbuilding activity is driven by his perception of two factors: quality and popularity, both of which vary by country and culture.

Knowledge Knowledge is the extent of the consumer’s awareness of the brand and understanding of its identity. The awareness levels about the brand and what it stands for shows the intimacy that consumers share with the brand. True knowledge of the brand comes through brand-building.

Differentiation and Relevance taken together say a lot about its growth potential (“Brand Vitality”), while Esteem and Knowledge determine the current power of a brand (“Brand Stature”).

A Survey based on the Brand Asset Valuator is conducted annually containing data about 20.000 brands, based on the opinion of over 230.000 respondents in 44 countries. The model is about building, measuring and managing brand equity.