Lighting the way to new planning frameworks

Baiba Matisone, the Berlin-based brand and creative strategist, lecturer, and founder of Planning Folklore, has taken perhaps the industry’s deepest dive ever into the world of planning frameworks.

She has surveyed hundreds of practitioners throughout the industry to find out what works, what doesn’t, and why.

“My main idea was to understand what the most commonly used models are, and what ones stand alone, created by the practitioners themselves,” Matisone tells Dentsu Ireland’s chief strategy officer Dave Winterlich on the Inside Marketing podcast.

“We also divided our audience in three groups. One was purely creative strategists who are not doing brand strategy. The second group was purely brand strategists who are not doing creative strategy. And in the third one, where most respondents fall, is the creative and brand strategist – the one person who’s doing both jobs.”

Now is the time for a cohesive, age friendly healthcare system

---

How your legacy gift to Concern Worldwide leaves a better future for some of the world’s poorest families

---

Good governance is critical for effective healthcare investigations

---

Joined-up IT means medics have more time to focus on patient care

---

For Matisone, the biggest surprise her research elicited was the fact that so many strategists wear these two hats, leading them to use inappropriate frameworks for each.

“For example, they are using creative strategy frameworks to build the brand, or do the brand strategy,” she says.

Many use the familiar Get/Who/To/By (GWTB) template, designed to boil marketing strategy to its essence for a creative brief.

It is a much-loved formula whereby “Get” refers to the target audience, “Who” refers to the consumer problem or current behaviour, “To” is the desired behaviour, and “By” is the big idea, the core message designed to deliver it.

As part of her research Matisone tracked down Martyn Straw, the originator of the framework, who came up with it while working at BBDO New York in the early noughties. Straw added an entirely new dimension to the creative brief, the behavioural change that led to business growth, she says.

Yet Matisone’s research indicated the same formula is now being used to develop brand strategy, “which, in my mind, is totally insane,” she says.

It is also sometimes misused through the addition, or removal, of certain elements, and by a lack of emphasis on exploring consumer behaviours and motivations.

With his one-page document, divided into quadrants, Straw was, she points out, trying to write a briefing format that the creative department would accept and which would help improve the work being delivered.

But over time different versions of the model appeared, typically either removing the “Who” element, or adding a new element, “Because”, which Matisone believes undermines the framework, and can result in a misleading brief, typically one with no consumer insight which focuses only on the product.

It’s a framework that only looks simple. In fact, a properly executed GWTB brief takes hard work to achieve, she points out.

Matisone’s research unearthed the widespread use within the industry of creative strategy models for brand strategy, and vice versa. Moreover, she found a tendency among people to view all frameworks as the same.

But brand and creative strategies are two different disciplines, she says. Ignoring that is why the work of “godfathers” of brand management, such as American organisational theorist David Aaker and author of Strategic Brand Management, Prof Kevin Lane Keller, is now routinely corrupted.

People are using the frameworks invented decades ago, but updating elements of them simply “to sound smarter or cooler, of whatever the reason,” Matisone says. “Sometimes we skip some elements and can’t even explain why [we] skipped that element from the model.”

This is in part why she decided to collect and record all the models she could, from brand strategy right up through trend-hunting and the social media frameworks of the present day.

The creative strategy side Matisone’s work was hampered slightly by the fact that, in the 1990s, the trend was for agencies to sell their work based on their own model, which in turn encouraged more to develop models of their own.

However, it all boiled down to more or less the same three steps: situation analyses; envisaging the next step; and figuring out how to get from here to there.

“So many models can be described based on this linear planning kind of type,” Matisone says.

The other family of frameworks are the 3cs, 4cs and 5cs models – “lets call it the c family”, she says. These all have the same core components, such as customers, costs or competitors, but here again “someone is taking something away, or adding something, to create a model that is more complicated”, she says.

Then there is Stephen King’s planning cycle framework, which dates from the 1970s and asks the same kind of questions: Where are we? Why are we there? Where could we be? How could we get there? And, finally, are we getting there?

This too has been routinely edited in the intervening decades. “The question we have completely lost is ‘are we getting there?’” Matisone says.

Her research found a serious disadvantage common to all frameworks. “They are all very focused, especially in creative strategy, on short -thinking,” she says.

“They focus on how to quickly get some awareness, and how to quickly get sales up for our clients. What we are not seeing is a model that would include long-term thinking.”

There are other drawbacks too, including the fact that most prevailing models are focused on business-to-consumer, and don’t apply so well to business-to-business situations. Moreover, they don’t adapt well to quirky newer business models, such as business-to-business-to-consumer operations.

“Respondents basically said that we need new models and new ways to think about strategy in general, both in terms of brand strategy and creative strategy. They also said most of the models feel outdated because they are very much focused on TV as a main channel, and nowadays we are more focused on digital channels as the main channels when we are planning our campaigns,” Matisone says.

Not everyone even uses frameworks. “The more research I have the more I conclude that there will always be two different camps,” she says.

One camp loves frameworks and “they know that frameworks help them to structure their thinking, and help to bring not only the creative team, but also the client team, on to the same page much faster”.

“But then there is this opposing camp who say, you know, we love creativity – and nothing good has ever come from using frameworks,” she says.

Personally Matisone is agnostic. “I believe it’s about diversity, we can’t just have one way how to do things,” she says.

To hear more go to irishtimes.com/tags/insidemarketing-advertisingfeature/