microtrends

Most of the (planning) blogosphere prides itself on knowing about trends. But how long does a trend have to be around or far foes it have to spread before it's influence has a knock on effect in other places?

Complexity theory suggests that small things can have a big influence without us even knowing. This is exactly what pollster and Burston-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn suggests in his new book . Penn was Bill Clinton's pollster in the 1992 presidential election and the man responsible for the phrase "soccer mom".

You can hear Penn talking a little more about this in this interview . Although the trends he talks about are a little dated, he makes the valid point that if 1% of the population are doing something, that this is already 3M people - enough to have changed the outcome of the last US presidential election.

toppling

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

One of the reasons that brand vegetables - onions and the like - aren't suited to today's world are that they are (imho) to static and don;t encourage brands to evolve. This doesn't always sit well with clients who are comfortable with the idea of nailing down a brand definition to the floor, but there is a nice stat that helps make the point.

The topple rate (invented by McKinsey) measures how many market leading companies lose their status during the the next 5 years. In the 1970's it was estimated to be about 8%. In the period of 1997 to 2002 it had climbed to 16% and it is believed to have held steady or climbed in the next 5 years.Over the next 20 years McKinsey expects it to double again.

a better link

One thing that i didn't do well when setting up this blog was give it a simple URL. I was probably trying to be cheap and save on registering something and wasn't sure if the name would stick. But now that with "planning from the outside" has stuck, and with some gentle prodding from Jason at the APG, I've fixed the URL to: www.planningfromtheoutside.com

So do me a favor and if you link to the site, please use this.

2 weeks in Provence

View from Les Baumes de Provences









By the time I got to post last night I didn't have the energy to rifle through photos of the last few weeks spent in Provence visiting my parents. The highlights included lunch and wine tasting in Chateauneuf du Pape. The way the town has been left you can still imagine how it must have been in medieval times -a castle on top of the hill guarding the popes while the Papal seat was in Avignon. The ground beneath the vines is covered in large stones and apparently always have been. It certainly didn't hurt the wine we tasted.

Another great stop (other than the numerous restaurants, ice cream stands and wine stores), was St Remy de Provence where Van Gogh spent the last years of his life in an asylum. There is a great guided walk you can take which points out places where the artist used to paint. The landscape is eerily unchanged, so much so that you visualize the scene in front of you on canvas.

But the best part of the whole trip was truly switching off for two weeks. Given the minimal vacation allowance in the US compared to Europe, it's easy to forget what switching off (or rather switching to something else) is like. It would do us all good to remember.


Chateauneuf du Pape















If you asked the kids what the best part of the trip was it might be our time at an Accrobranche outpost. This is a rope climbing course for kids and adults set through the trees in the forest. The kids had rope bridges and slings to get through that were only a few feet off the ground, but the adult stuff was set up 30 ft in the air!

effective planing

Richard Huntington has started a good discussion about planning needing to be a bit more "nasty" and stand up for effectiveness a bit more (in face of the pressure of feeding/agreeing with creatives).

Maybe we need to frame this issue in a different light- maybe planning needs to go beyond just effectiveness and focusing on being objective. Objective about the need for an ad in the first place, objective about whether the work is right and objective about
the work we see. This, is the hardest part. You can be as objective as you want in terms of the framework of your analysis and what the ads need to do - even how they do it. But your response can be subjective if you think you have intuited how the ads are going play to people. This is the hardest thing to justify unless you have some specific things to point to, and even then it's tough. But you can't be totally objective- no one can.

Besides, if the brief isn't baked with all the objective, effectiveness driven thinking, then it's not a good brief and the teams shouldn't be working on it.