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 strategyStrategists need to be business savvy, identifying commercial opportunities and realising them, reconnecting with the entrepreneurial skills that founded the discipline, or face obsolescence

Once 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

Admap propagates thought leadership in brand communications and is published monthly in print. To subscribe visit www.warc.com/myadmap

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.

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FIGURE 1: AVERAGE COMPANY LIFESPAN ON S&P INDEX

Average company lifespan on S&P 500 Index (in years)

Projections basedon current data

Year (each data point represents a rolling seven-year average of average lifespan)

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

DataPersonalisedexperience

Personalisedexperience

Data

BRANDSTRATEGY

ENGAGEMENTSTRATEGY

SERVICESTRATEGY

Our mission:creating an accident-

free Britain

Digital contentencouraging saferdriving: quizzes,polls and videos

Monitoring and rewardingsafe driving: Aviva Drive app

FIGURE 2: BRAND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ACTION – AVIVA (CAR INSURANCE)

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This article was first published in Admap magazine September 2016 ©Warc www.warc.com/admap

encourage safer driving through engaging interactive content with partners, including polls, quizzes and celebrity videos which aimed to create higher social awareness and self-awareness of good driving. This engagement provided rich data which helped us create a more personalised user experience, from social platforms to search engine optimisation to website to retargeting – content which was optimised based on social and digital analytics. And third, to inspire people to download the Aviva Drive app to monitor their driving skills and get a lower premium when they drove safely.UK Drive Challenge results: The Good Thinking launch has been a phenomenal success, surpassing tracking benchmarks from the successful ‘Whitehouse’ campaign. More than 100,000 people have downloaded the Aviva Drive app – that’s more in three months than in the previous three years. Added to this are the 500,000 people who have engaged with the campaign content, spending over 20,000 hours with the brand. And finally, there has been a sales increase of 7.3%, which is 5% ahead of targets and a 10% increase compared to the same period for the previous year.The future: Good Thinking has unlocked a new wave of momentum for Aviva: the

Drive Challenge is now being rolled out as a model for other markets, such as Asia, and the business is set on launching other challenges addressing society’s ‘wicked problems’, such as saving enough into pensions.

It has mobilised the organisation beyond marketing to fast-track innovative new propositions and digital services which solve deep human needs. It has focused energy on creating a simpler and more personalised customer experience, with

While the opportunity to add value in the boardroom has never been greater, the headwinds of change that are transforming and disrupting clients’ businesses are set to erode planning’s influence unless it adapts.

That requires a shift in both skillset and mindset, where each strategist acts as a brand entrepreneur to propel a client’s business forward by: Setting a compelling vision which helps organisations step into the future. Acting as a catalyst that makes things happen inside clients’ organisations through flexing V-shaped skills. Acting as a firehose of new ideas that drives commercial innovation. Competitively solving human needs, not just in a brand story but through user experiences and service development. Constantly adapting at pace based on live intelligence from real people.

That’s not only a future that is more exciting and valuable, it’s also one that’s more satisfying. As Richard Branson would say, “Screw it, let’s do it.”

MyAviva at its heart. It has embraced the role digital content can play in genuinely helping customers by putting in place an agile integrated social content team. And most of all, it has helped the business ask some very challenging questions about itself and how it needs to structurally transform to deliver exceptional Good Thinking.

This highlights the opportunity for strategists: Good Thinking’s real success is that it is very much alive in the boardroom – it forces the organisation to always ask how it is helping people across every decision, highlighting the hugely powerful role brand entrepreneurship can play in the future.

SUMMARY

The future for strategists has never been as exciting, or as alarming.

“ In a commercial and agency landscape being fundamentally disrupted by digital, it’s time for planning to adapt again”

An example of Aviva’s Drive Challenge campaign at Waterloo station in London