It's been more than 40 years since Stanley Pollitt from the UK agency BMP birthed the account planning role to design a process of advertising development that would rely more on rigorous, research-based work than on gut feel. The account planner's role would be to develop a deep understanding of a brand's position in its market, and use associated research data and consumer feedback to glean insight into a brand's core connection points with consumers. Today -- and probably for the rest of our professional lives -- a planner's ultimate role is to develop big ideas and great marketing concepts derived from and in concert with people as partners in a holistic endeavor.
The role has transformed how forward thinking agencies help brands connect more deeply with people. Strategic Account Planners, also called Strategy Planners, have now embraced the Internet and Social Media (SoMe) as the harbingers of a new era of consumer-centric engagement marketing. Moreover, Strategy Planners are fast becoming as prominent and notable as their rock star brethren, creative directors. And for good reason -- great Planners exhibit a unique synthesis of data researcher; market, business, and consumer analyst; marketer; technologist; and (perhaps most important of all) storyteller. They develop new, unseen perspectives (sorry Farrah Bostick, there are such things as insights), and can, on occasion, create big ideas from which innovative marketing platforms and communications campaigns emerge.
The story of the Strategy Planner is well-known among successful agencies. Brands too are assigning significant value to agency and industry strategists, such as Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang or 360i's David Berkowitz, now recognized globally not for their ability to create memorable Super Bowl spots but for their ability, among others, to interpret how SoMe and digital marketing is changing the relationship between brands, markets, and consumers. Google's Liminal blog is another example of how prominent the role of research-based strategy is becoming.
A story that has not been told well, however, is how Strategy Planners work. What exactly do they do, and how do they do it?
Several months ago, I came across a fantastic book called Business Model Generation at the Seattle airport, of all places, while waiting for a colleague to arrive and various strategy meetings at Microsoft. Read the whole thing in 90 minutes. The book's central focus is around the Business Model Canvas Download Business_model_canvas_poster, a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool that enables planners and strategists to describe, design, challenge, invent, differentiate, and pivot a business opportunity or idea into an operational model. I found it fascinating that the book was actually crowdsourced by 470 practitioners, researchers, consultants, marketers, and analysts from 45 countries. It's a fantastic primer for those untrained in business modeling, and an extremely useful tool for people responsible for defining the components and mapping how an idea becomes a business model. There's a lot more to this, so I highly recommend buying and using it. They're actually near to publishing the next book -- Business Model You -- for people in need of re-engineering their careers and their own personal brands. I've contributed to this dialogue and anticipate even greater response.
Using the Canvas over the past several months -- most recently with our [wire] stone Chicago team -- it became clear to me that I had already developed the guts of a canvas for Strategy Account Planning but had never organized it in a way nearly as useful as the Business Model Canvas. The concept -- create a tool for Strategy Planners that identifies the most important work a Planner is responsible for, and organizes it into a process for doing the work -- baked inside my head for months...until now. Here Download Planning_canvas_cal_rd6 (and pictured below) is the first draft, and an accompanying explanation document Download Planner_Canvas_070411 describing what the pieces are and how it works.
In future blogs I will review the Canvas and the process piece by piece. For now, please review and respond with comments and suggestions. Like the Business Model Canvas, my ultimate goal is to crowdsource this project and offer it to planners, strategists, and agencies everywhere.
Send it to friends and co-workers, and ask them to send comments directly to me at scottd44@mac.com.
I look forward to your feedback.
Thanks!
