Any advice for a Strategic Planner who needs help guiding a department having an identity crisis (Traditional planners? Strategists?). Double challenge: with account leads not used to working with us?

likesmart
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First piece of advice: don't work with SapientRazorfish.

Second piece of advice: show how you can make everyone else's jobs easier. First, make it clear your primary job is to identify the problem to be solved. And not the necessarily the problem the client says they have like poor sales, but the reason behind the problem they say they have. Dig deep, find the root cause and cure the symptoms. Second, identify actual insights that can help solve the problem you identified earlier. You shorten back and forth and mental masturbation, you give clear, logical direction and get everyone on the same page and you reduce the swirl this industry is becoming notorious for.

Brand planning hasn't lost a sliver of relevance over the years. The problem is so few actually do it properly anymore. Planning has become so unneccessarily fragmented over the years and the industry echo chambers have become so full of bloated posturing about "how brands are now systems" and other such pseudo intellectual blah-blah that we've forgotten what planning actually is.

likesmart

If the problem has been defined already, then great. The biggest problem is that they think it has, but it hasn't. "My sales are down" is not a problem, it's a symptom. Traditional brand planning shouldn't result in fluff but as I said before, so few people do it right anymore that fluff is often the result.

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That’s a core issue with traditional brand planning “identifying the problem that needs to be solved”. I can’t tell you how many clients have given us the hours from traditional agencies because they just want something concrete and actionable that they can test and learn from, not a fluffy brand planning process that attempts to redefine a problem that has already been defined. The fluffiness is why less clients (and internal teams) are allocating hours for a traditional brand planning process.

My advice is to work on what your team can provide: package up concrete deliverables that internal teams can buy into and help you sell to clients. I.e.: Find a way to execute primary research quickly and cheaply. Turn insights into consumer journeys. Deliver a roadmap that clients can act on.

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If they don't do any of what I describe then they're not planners. My advice to the OP would still be to get back to what planning's supposed to be about.

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Oh god it’s all just words, you know this right?

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An identity crisis as in traditional brand planning is becoming less relevant and less clients are willing to pay for the hours or deliverables?

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GPD: I would say that 85% of the planners I meet are fluff and don’t do any of what you describe.

So it doesn’t matter what you call it

This may be a silly question, but what is the difference in a brand strategist and a brand planner?

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