I once had a lively debate with a pretty high-profile industry commentator who continues - good on him - to make a happy living teaching MBA modules and writing articles and giving lectures on most things marketing.
He argued - no doubt still does - that the moment you work in marketing, on any side of the Corporate/Agency divide, but where you’re ultimately mixed up in the Big Selling Machine, then at that point in time... “You” and “The Consumer” forever divide.
Like a split atom.
His stance was that once you’re working “on the inside”, a practitioner in the dark arts of persuasion, you forgo all rights to simply being a consumer, all past Man-on-the-Street innocence and naivety lost. For good. You sit behind the mirror, and they sit in focus groups, a circle of Mysterious Abstract Alien Beings.
Ah, look, do you see, there’s one, “A Consumer”!
I said I thought that was bollocks.
And I still do.
There’s nothing very voodoo about consumer understanding. I think insightful consumer understanding typically comes from being un-clinical, from being emotive.
Great planners know people, like people, want to know people, want crucially to know them better. They want to know about foibles and quirks and traits, about motivations, about the internal swirl of anxieties, fears, hopes, dreams; they want to better understand the things that can round the shoulders and leave someone skulking; want to understand what puffs a chest and makes a person walk a little taller.
Great planners are People People and they have to draw on raw first-hand experiences and encounters, on “feel” and intuition, of head, heart and gut, in order to then make the empathetic leaps they make.
How can you build a brand, come up with a great campaign thought, a killer social media idea, make any of it compelling, and believe deep down that your ideas are really good and really going to work... if you can’t first empathise with your audience?
I don’t see how it’s possible.
When I buy one brand over another, I do it as a consumer. When I smile at a great ad, get hooked in to what a brand is up to, cheer at the smarts involved, I initially smile and cheer just as anyone else would. Any appreciation and professional level of understanding, that comes after.
Folk who work inside the Selling Machine, they may be better equipped to unpick and dissect what an ad says and why it’s doing what it’s doing, but I believe we’re all prone to the sucker punch and purchase when we see something that rings our bell.
Bob McKee, the guy who wrote The Book on how to write a screenplay (Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting) gladly admits that when he sits down in the dark and those opening credits roll, he’s prone to enjoy a movie and experience just the same ride as the next guy. His knowledge of theory doesn’t get in the way of his inner child, he’s as bewitched by movie magic as anyone else.
Not how Bob McKee watches movies.
Advertising/comms/account/brand/digital planners – whatever the prefix – all planners need to have heart, not clinical detachment. They cannot be at a remove, looking down from on high, urging the mouse along the maze. It’s not how you build a mousetrap. If you cannot relate, or at least try hard to, you’re surely in the wrong business?
SP.
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