Why Do We Need Account Planning?

After reading Jon Steel's Truth, Lies, and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning as well as various articles about account planning and talking to several industry professionals about the lack of account planning departments within their agencies, I noticed there was some controversy over whether account planning was necessary or even worthwhile for that matter. Based on the knowledge I gathered, I concluded that the presence of an account planner is the only way to guarantee the consumer's needs are addressed in each step of the process.

During a focus group of account planners (which is hilarious in itself) in 1995 in which conversation surrounded the importance of practice, one New York planner, despite expectations, argued against the need for planning when he agreed that “not all non-planning agencies make bad ads. ‘there are extremely good agencies that don’t have planning that do really good work, because the people there are intuitive planners or highly respect the consumer.” I would agree that it is not an account planner but a planning mindset that is key to successful advertising. Because we cannot assume that creatives, media, or account people possess the necessary planning qualities when their strengths likely lie elsewhere, there is a need for the distinctive role to guarantee the existence of the planning mindset within the agency. A planner, by essence, is a chameleon. He is someone intuitive and agile enough to slip into any role that the moment calls for—whether it is to empathize or communicate on behalf of the consumer, client, or agency—in order to bridge all three parties together.     

The view that account planning is a fluffy title for a researcher who merely serves as a “sales tool” in client pitches originates from the perceived lack of distinction between the roles of an account planner and market researcher. Account planning “works” because unlike quantitative research, it goes beyond numbers and integrates itself into each step in the campaign creation process. Although a useful tool for gaining footing and exploring the mere scope of a topic, quantities research is rather limited in its storytelling capabilities. Furthermore, it is easily subject to bias in its inability to translate to natural environments . Account planning’s role is to ensure that a message resonates with a consumer on a personal level, so that moment of is valued and stands out against the thousands of other ads the consumer is conditioned to ignore each day. To beat the odds in this way, a planner must uncover a truth so deep at the core of the consumer’s relationship with the product/brand, that the consumer himself only realizes it when he served the message . A personal connection between the consumer and brand is more than a mere “sales tool” and is hardly possible to uncover through simple quantitative measures.

The process by which planner fulfills his role is “an approach, rather than a ‘system’ to be identically applied across all accounts. Assessing each account on its own and determining which methods will be most useful in uncovering consumer insights. Focus groups and interviews are standard examples of qualitative research methods, but there remains much variety in ethnographic and experimental research as well.Although it is unlikely that the methods used to drill insights from consumers’ perceptions will be uniform across accounts, it is often that the insights from one method will lead the pursuit into another until a conclusion is met. Chris Kocek, author of The Practical Pocket Guide to Account Planning, explains that the insights run on a constant feedback loop, where new information is presenting new research opportunities. It is essential that an account planner know when he has hit the “sweet spot” and is able to end the loop. This, like all processes in the planning mindset, is highly reliant on intuitive capabilities--capabilities you can only guarantee with an account planner on board.