1. them, they failed the first time. It turned
out that you couldn’t just make ‘backroom
researchers’ into catalysts who galvanised
clients, stood firm with account management,
and inspired creatives. You needed to start
fresh, and mould the skills ‘bottom up’.
And you needed to roll up your sleeves:
many BMP planners conducted over 200
research interviews a year, using raw initial
stimulus to get people’s responses and then
get feedback to the creative (what we’d now
call ‘iterative prototyping’).
Those pivots were enough to establish
and grow a successful discipline.
Fast-forward almost five decades and
planning may no longer conduct hundreds
of research groups a year themselves, but
the core empathetic skill of understanding
what makes people tick remains firmly intact
– through interrogating Google search and
analytics, social conversation monitoring,
semiotics, trend analysis, research, and more.
The ability to spot human insight and apply
it to a brand to provide competitive advantage
continues to serve agencies well in new
business and as a catalyst for breakthrough
creative work, as demonstrated by the strong
correlation between account planning group
Brand entrepreneurship
is the future of strategy
Strategists need to be
business savvy, identifying
commercial opportunities
and realising them,
reconnecting with the
entrepreneurial skills that
founded the discipline, or
face obsolescence
O
nce upon a time, planning
– and its related cousin,
strategy – didn’t exist. It
wasn’t until two mavericks
– Stephen King at JWT and
Stanley Pollitt at BMP – saw an opportunity
and did something about it that strategic
planning as we know it was born.
Both shared a conviction that agencies
could add more value for clients (and
therefore revenue) by shaping solutions that
were more effective.
Both saw an opportunity for a new role
and skillset that put understanding real
people at the heart of the strategic and
creative process (Pollitt) and used informed
insight to underpin a clear vision for clients’
business as a ‘brand architect’ (King).
And both acted on their convictions,
redefining both the value of what agencies
did, and the way they did it.
Both at their heart were not just
planners, but entrepreneurs. And as many
entrepreneurs have done before and after
By Dom Boyd,
Group Head of Strategy,
adamandeveDDB
2. Admap propagates thought leadership in brand communications and is published
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strategy awards and Cannes creative awards,
such as Sport England’s ‘This Girl Can’ and
Guinness’s ‘Black Is Not A Colour’.
In fact, the evidence from recent
APG winners also shows strategy adding
transformational value as a catalyst within,
and increasingly beyond, communications. It’s
this catalytic quality that shines a light on the
opportunity for strategists in the future.
The value strategic planning adds has the
potential to be magnified much further in the
coming years, thanks to:
Businesses seeking out more creatively
driven ‘North Star’ thinking around which
they can rally employees to help them adapt
in a fast-changing competitive environment.
Marketing growing in boardroom influence
as it intersects with technology, customer
service and data and is better able to
demonstrate RoI.
Organisations increasingly recognising the
importance of understanding human needs
and organising themselves around these in
order to innovate.
Modern strategists’ ability to cut to
the competitive core by connecting with
deep human needs and translating that into
inspirational solutions makes them a powerful
corporate catalyst.
But there’s a problem. Like a turkey
in the week before Thanksgiving or
Christmas, strategists must beware of being
too optimistic – the past can be a poor
predictor of future success. In a commercial
and agency landscape being fundamentally
disrupted by digital, it’s time for planning to
adapt again. Or else.
THE PROBLEM WITH
STRATEGIC PLANNING
Five changes threaten the future of strategists:
1There are now more interdependencies
and stakeholders that need to align for
a project to achieve its aim successfully.
Yet as skillsets fragment, the danger is that
strategists ‘specialise into irrelevance’, as
Gareth Kay notes in Admap, October 2015.
2Strategy is becoming structurally
divorced from the biggest factors
influencing human behaviour: the user
experience across the ecosystem. As
Nick Hirst argues in Admap, June 2012,
“conceptual planning and big ideas aren’t
enough if the experience is poor”.
3Digital service innovation has become
as important as stories in building
brand value, but can often sit outside of the
marketing function.
4In a data-rich ‘always on’ culture, fluidity
trumps fixed: plans will be useful, but
adapting at speed will be essential. So the
strategic operating system and tools must
operate faster and more flexibly.
5Clients’ businesses are being radically
challenged by new ‘outlier’ competitors.
An analysis of the S&P index shows the
lifespan of businesses is increasingly brutish
and short (Figure 1).
In this world, clients need a different
kind of creative thinking which futureproofs
their business beyond communications. Each
of these challenges highlights a simple fact:
the commercial context in which strategists
operate is fundamentally changing.
To thrive in the future, strategy must
change with the times by focusing on where
it can add the most value – by focusing
on turning human and cultural insight into
inventive solutions which propel business
forwards, faster. That now requires: an ability
to act as an organisational catalyst that shapes
growth opportunities and innovative solutions
within and beyond communications; different
kinds of thinking skillsets, reaching out
beyond the confines of brand strategy into
new areas, such as experience and service
design strategy, to influence the broader
business; and an agile mindset with an
aptitude for continuous action and adapting
at pace. Together, I’d call these traits ‘brand
entrepreneurship’: an echo of King’s ‘brand
architects’ recast for a digital environment
that demands action above all else.
PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Brand entrepreneurship requires a shift both
in skillset and mindset for strategists – closer
to what Google’s Eric Schmidt calls being a
‘smart creative’. This involves:
Doing, not just thinking: Strategists
now need to be less like thinkers who hold
the strategic line and more like activists who
proactively sniff out competitive commercial
opportunities and then make them happen.
You need business savvy.
Innovation, not just insight: Having
cultural or consumer insight is no longer
enough. Strategists need to translate
emergent cultural and technological trends
into concrete initiatives and services which
add value to people’s lives. This means being
a firehose of new ideas that acts as the
‘intel inside’ by constantly testing these via
prototypes with real people.
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
FIGURE 1: AVERAGE COMPANY LIFESPAN ON S&P INDEX
Average company lifespan on S&P 500 Index (in years)
Projections based
on current data
Year (each data point represents a rolling seven-year average of average lifespan)
3. V-shaped, not T-shaped: Strategists
must become strong interdisciplinary
‘connectors’ and collaborators, joining the
dots horizontally across client teams to
inspire organisational alignment. This means
being a versatile specialist with a wider
portfolio of digital skills that can flex – such
as design thinking and UX.
Agile, not right: In an environment rich
in live data, strategists need to reacquaint
themselves with getting feedback signals ‘on
the fly’ and iterating. Brand entrepreneurs
understand success comes from learning faster
what really works rather than trying to be
100% right. Seventy per cent right is enough.
Solutions, not just strategy: In a world
where speed wins, strategists must become
creative doers, pushing things forward
collaboratively by sketching prototypes,
writing scripts and coming up with content
ideas so the team learns faster. Strategists
must be expert doers.
CASE STUDY: AVIVA ‘GOOD
THINKING’
Background: Aviva is a financial services
brand that provides a broad range of products
from car insurance to pensions. For many
years it had run a humorous campaign in the
UK featuring comedian Paul Whitehouse.
While the campaign was well established,
it was increasingly at odds with Aviva’s
ambition to have an idea that could work
locally and help it increase the average
number of products each customer held.
Aviva needed a different approach.
Strategy: Planning identified that the barrier
we needed to tackle wasn’t awareness of
the products themselves; it was the fact that
people’s relationship with financial services
is broken. They disliked its complex jargon,
distrusted its motives and felt disconnected
from its products. But to repair a broken
relationship requires more than words: it
needs demonstrable actions.
This gave us a mission for the entire
business: to establish a new, mutually
beneficial relationship built on doing good
things, not just saying them. That required a
different kind of idea, which enabled Aviva
to behave unlike any other financial services
brand, by: positively tackling the ‘wicked
problems’ in society; providing simple
innovative solutions to them; making it easy
for people to experience these solutions; and
encouraging reasons to engage and participate.
We called it Good Thinking, and it was
designed to transform not just what Aviva
did in communications but how it behaved as
an organisation.
Launching Good Thinking internally:
Our first task was to introduce Good
Thinking and what it meant in practice to
every member of staff around the world. This
included redesigning criteria for proposition
development, user experience, and cross-
pollinating the digital innovation roadmap
with marketing plans to ensure we prioritised
addressing the biggest human needs and gave
them the strongest budget support.
Launching Good Thinking externally:
Following the introduction of Good Thinking
to customers via DM and eCRM, we focused
our main communications launch on car
insurance where the business needed to
support sales fastest.
Unlike previous price-driven campaigns, we
focused on an emotive ‘wicked problem’: to
create an accident-free Britain. This mission
was brought to life through a new campaign,
the Aviva Drive Challenge (Figure 2).
The challenge was designed to achieve
three outcomes. First, to create a public
conversation about what kinds of people
and traits created safer roads. Second, to
Strategic idea:
GOOD
THINKING
Data
Personalised
experience
Personalised
experience
Data
BRAND
STRATEGY
ENGAGEMENT
STRATEGY
SERVICE
STRATEGY
Our mission:
creating an accident-
free Britain
Digital content
encouraging safer
driving: quizzes,
polls and videos
Monitoring and rewarding
safe driving: Aviva Drive app
FIGURE 2: BRAND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ACTION –
AVIVA (CAR INSURANCE)
