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.
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