Faris Yakob’s Award Winning Paper on the Future of Planning – Choose the Future.

Some excepts on Planning, Customer and Briefing below…

ON PLANNING…
All aspects of brand behaviour are communication and human communication is always about relationships, and less about message transmission than we believe.

ON CUSTOMERS…

People aren’t customers or prospects, because customers are not the same as people. Customers are to people as waves are to water. ‘Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people.

The focus of planning is ‘consumer insight’; trying to understand the kind of people who are most likely to buy, but behavioural economics suggests that where and what and when are as least as important as who.

ON BRIEFING…
Moving away from an assumed messaging approach, briefs must incorporate fresh insight from multiple areas and expand their framework.

• What brand problem? Consumer problem?
• How do we drive measurable, profitable brand growth?
• Who are participants and passives?
• What provocations can we glean from their behaviour?
• Appropriate brand actions and apertures and associations?
• Desired behavioural response?

However, briefing is a collaborative process, not a rectified document, and generative propositions that inform actions and apertures, as well as a solution architecture and inspiration, are all mandatory in helping craft articulations as diverse as we will require in 2020.