Ideas We Love: Shelf-Help 📖 🧐

Issue Number 46: Book recommendations for those curious about Communications Planning

Hi there. How are you?

Recently a young planner we know asked us a very good question. What should they be reading to gain a broader understanding of the discipline of communications planning? The person in question is a regular reader of WARC and listens to the WARC podcast religiously. They had already made their way through the major works of Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. They had devoured Binet and Field’s oft quoted works published alongside the IPA, just as they’d devoured Richard Shotton and Rory Sutherland’s work on the application of behavioural science to marketing and communications. So what next?

Unlike many areas of business, or indeed marketing, books on media planning - let alone ‘communications planning’ as a specific and adjacent field - are few and far between. Faris Yakob’s Paid Attention is definitely worth paying attention to on this topic. But beyond this, we had to think about the things we’ve found useful and instructive.

Having scribbled down our suggestions for that young planner, we thought that in a change to our regular programming, we would share that non-exhaustive list of some of the books, writers and ideas that have been influential to our work as communications planners. It was interesting to us that whilst the list is offered without order or hierachy, some themes and connection points began to emerge as put we pen to paper.

Hopefully most - if not all - also manage to avoid the normal traps that many business books typically fall into: That is to say that they are worth reading from cover to cover and pass the ‘this meeting could have been an e-mail’ test...

A Masterclass in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King 🤴

Alongside BMP’s Stanley Pollitt, Stephen King was instrumental in establishing the discipline of ‘Account Planning’ in Advertising agencies. During his career King published a vast array of papers - covering everything from the origins of account planning to the allocation of media spend - and this book handily collates all of the most important ones, alongside commentary from leading industry figues including Paul Feldwick & Rory Sutherland and many more besides.

In particular we find ourselves frequently coming back to What is a Brand? (1971) and Has Marketing Failed, or was it Never Really Tried? (1985). The latter is particularly interesting where communications planning is concerned. He preaches a mantra of customer centricity, long-term thinking, the application avenues beyond ‘classic advertising’ and a pursuit of innovation. Despite being written 40 years ago, practitioners working today will recognise the same issues King is trying to warn against. (Buy A Masterclass in Brand Planning here)

Behind the Scenes in Advertising by Jeremy Bullmore 🐂 🐂 🐂

A logical companion to Stephen King is this compilation of Bullmore’s writing. Bullmore (pictured above) and King worked closely together at JWT in London and like King, Bullmore’s writing covers a broad spectrum of topics related to the business of communications. Adopting a much less ‘technical’ tone than King, the clarity and simplicity of his writing betrays the complexity of the thinking (a lesson in itself). Bullmore and King’s work effectively represent the York Notes of the advertising industry. When working on a new brief or challenge, you’ll often find that Bullmore or King will have eloquently addressed the issue already and started to pave a way for you to reach a sensible and effective solution.

Many of the 70 odd articles featured in this book have been made available by Bullmore’s former employer WPP and can be found online here. Personal favourites from the Bullmore back catalogue include Posh Spice and Persil and Why Every Brand Encounter Counts. Both of which were written c.2000, but as with so much of his writing, the teaching is as valuable today as it was at time of publication. (Buy Behind The Scenes in Advertising here)

Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt 🤓

“Every industry was once a growth industry” according to Levitt in his 1960 article Marketing Myopia. What should be done when growth starts to slow? Levitt argues that businesses risk failure when they define themselves not by what need they fulfil for the customer but by the product they sell - drawing a neat distinction between the process of ‘selling’ and ‘marketing’ in the process. Here Levitt uses an example of the railroads in the US - they saw themselves as a rail business and not as a transportation business, leaving themselves vulnerable to market forces.

To survive the changing tastes or needs of the consumer - businesses and brands need to ‘plot the obsolescence of what produces their livelihood now’ - and define what it is they do for customers in the broadest possible terms. A bit like the brand purpose movement, but without the fluffy bits.

The Pirate Inside by Adam Morgan 🏴‍☠️

Morgan (pictured above) is probably best known for his books Eating the Big Fish and A Beautiful Constraint, titles which popularised concepts associated with ‘challenger brands’ and ‘challenger thinking’.

The Pirate Inside is perhaps slightly less well known but is just as valuable. It offers advice on how to deploy challenger principles within the context of larger and potentially more beaureaucratic organisations, a situation I’m sure many of us find ourselves in. We think it’s most useful lesson for communication planning focusses on market and category orientation. In particular, the concept of ‘brand neighbourhoods’ is one we rely on alot of our work.

Here, the idea is to think more broadly about the set of brands with which you compete. Successful challengers manage to re-orientate the brands against which they are compared. Morgan argues that there is value in going beyond ‘share of market’ competitors and starting to think more about the brands that you compete with for ‘share of time’ with your target audience, much as Levitt advises when he recommends thinking about your business in the broadest possible terms. (Buy The Pirate Inside here)

After Image by John Grant 🩻

Written in 2002 as the internet was just starting to mature into the thing we know it as today, Grant makes the case that ‘informationalism’ would change everything for brands, giving rise to the need for many more types of communication than had existed before the advent of the web.

No longer tasked with simply building brand image, he suggested that media would work in a number of new and different ways: to build knowledge, to ‘shape’ reality, to create dialogue between customer and brand, to foster community, as a means of creating the opportunity for consumers to ‘copy’ one another via memetics, as a form of ‘storytelling’ and as a form of maintaining corporate reputation. Grant also pushes his idea of a ‘brand molecule’ : a way of identifying and addressing the various mental associations that a brand enjoys within the mind of a consumer. Again, a useful model for communications planning to explore.

Grant uses the broadest possible definition of media within each of these ‘media typologies’, subscribing to the notion of ‘everything communicating’. For a modern communications strategist there is still so much richness in his ideas. Even 20 years on, After Image feels incredibly radical. (Buy After Image here)

Dark Matter and Trojan Horses by Dan Hill 🐴

Dan Hill is a designer and accordingly, he doesn’t really talk about advertising and communications at all during this 2012 essay. Having said that there are so many parallels with the challenges he sees the discipline of ‘strategic design’ facing to the ones which a communications planner would recognise. We love his pursuit of asking better questions to identify the appropriate intervention to solve a problem, just as we love the ‘dark matter’ analogy central to this piece.

Drawn from the field of theoretical physics, the theory of dark matter suggests that there is an elemental force which accounts for 83% of all matter in the universe, whilst remaining entirely undetectable. Using a car as an example, Hill says “A particular BMW is an outcome of the company’s corporate culture, the legislative frameworks it works within, the business models it creates, the wider cultural habits it senses and shapes, the trade relationships, the logistics and supply networks… the design philosophies that underpin it’s performance, the path dependencies in the history of northern Europe… This is all dark matter; the car is the matter it produces”.

To be successful in landing work with our colleagues and clients, we have to engage with the ‘dark matter’ - especially if our ideas might be new or challenging to the established ways of working. Having good ideas is one thing, but navigating the systems which will buy and execute them - especially when requiring the involvement of multiple departments - is an entirely different skill altogether. (Read excerpts from Dark Matter and Trojan Horses here)

Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn by Stewart Brand 🚄 🧅

Referenced heavily by Dan Hill in Dark Matter and Trojan Horses is the work of Stewart Brand. Hill pays specific attention to Brand’s work on ‘pace layering’ - which he believes to be a model for a healthy civilisation: each layer operates at a different speed with “the fast layers innovating, and the slower layers stabilizing”, creating a system which “combines learning with continuity”. Brand continues by saying “Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost”.

This becomes a useful metaphor for brand building and communications too. To echo the work of Binet and Field - how are you thinking about balancing long and short term initiatives to create commercial advantage for a clients brand? How do the different elements and initiatives within the communications plan work together to forge a ‘healthy civilisation’? What communications efforts work at the fast level of ‘fashion’, winning attention? What are the consistent, slow-moving elements of ‘brand governance’ which work over time as much as they do in-time? (Read Pace Layers here)

Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg ✍️

Every really great planner or strategist we’ve ever worked with has also been an incredible writer. Being able to communicate effectively is a pre-requisite for being successful in strategic functions and a big part of that ability is driven by a mastery of the written word.

This book is a wonderful guide in how to make your written communication more varied, more rhythmic and by consequence, more effective. Klinkenborg promotes a style of writing which prioritises precision. There are some striking similarities between the process of writing and the process of planning and creativity, too. Klinkenborg tells us “the idea of writers block exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow. But if you accept that it is hard work, and that’s what it feels like while you’re writing, then everything is just as it should be. Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat. It’s a sign of engagement”.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 🫀 🪄

Few writers embody the precise, clinical approach promoted by Klinkeborg as much as Joan Didion does. Didion is instructive to planners because of how she writes about people and how she writes about the human experience. What we might call consumer insight. The Year of Magical Thinking isn’t always an easy read. It is essentially a memoir of Didion’s grief following the death of both her husband and her daughter. But, contained in the tragedy is some of the most essential writing about love, loss and humanity. A book that manages to render human behaviour brilliantly for the reader at the same time as it makes the deeply personal events of the story feel universal.

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman 🤣 📺

To this point, our recommendations have focussed on craft skills, really. Now we flip to something a little different. To analysing the consumption of media itself.

Postman has been described as ‘continuing the work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’. Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985. Long before the internet and long before ‘the attention economy’, this book examines how different media work to convey their message differently but also how different media (and technologies) change their audience’s behaviours. At a transactional level, Postman’s analysis provides planners with a framework for considering how platform choice fundamentally alters communication effectiveness, something that is particularly relevant as we navigate the shift from passive to interactive media to whatever comes next.

More situationally, it’s a useful ready-reckoner on the political and social landscape in which we find ourselves at this very minute. In the mid-80s, Postman was concerned with how the quality of public discourse was being diminished by ‘celebrity’ politicians whose telegenic features, rather than the quality of their ideas, made them attractive to the electorate. In an age governed by social, not TV, we can see how this trend has mutated and grown even more profound: Our statesman seeking to induce attention through the types of content that algorithms prioritise, rather than the quality of their policy.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff 🕵️ 📸

The modern companion to Postman is undoubtedly Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It’s a long book. You might prefer to watch her talk about it instead, above.

Zuboff’s work deals with a number of difficult topics related to the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated digital technologies: from understanding the asymetrical relationships between platforms and their users, to the ethics of data and the right to privacy, to how consumer psychology and ‘attention’ is hacked by digital services to model, capture and monetise desire for the products and services of advertisers and brands. As people who have been actively involved in advertising and communications it’s sometimes hard to engage with this kind of material, given it’s proximity to our livelihoods. But, we cannot and should not look away from some of the issues laid bare here and nor should we avoid having an opinion on the subject matter too.

Until Next Time 💕

We’d love to know what other books you’d suggest our young planner should read on the topic of Communications Planning. The more ‘leftfield’ the better. Answers on a Postcard, please!

Until next time. Cheerio.

Tom & Matt x

PS…..

As we said, this was a non-exhaustive list. It goes without saying you should read Sharp and Romaniuk, Binet and Field. The list of things we could have recommended a young planner read was nearly infinite…..

Read Russell Davies about being interesting. Read him writing about the power of powerpoint. Read his blog and subscribe to his newsletter. Read Paul Feldwick and Robert Heath. Read Roger Martin’s blog…buy his book on strategy. Read Matt Webb’s Interconnected. Read Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. Think about reading Peter Doyle. Give Giep Franzen a look if you’re feeling brave or under-employed. Read Phil Adams and James Caig. Read Sue Unerman, Nick Kendall & Neil Perkin. Read Orlando Wood. Read Richard Huntingdon. Read Martin Weigel. Read the APG Award entries and the IPA Effectiveness Award papers. Read Andy Nairn on Luck. Read David Ogilvy. Read Richard Rummelt. Read Matt Waksmann.

Read Marina Hyde. Read Marina O’Loughlin. Read The Sun. Read The Daily Mail. Read Take a Break. Read the bottom of the internet. Read a random magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. Read a book because of it’s cover. Read the other Stephen King. Read Martin Amis. Read Donna Tartt and Nina Stibbe and Ali Smith. Ask your colleagues what to read. Read far and wide. Read out-loud. It’s all grist for the mill. Go beyond your favourite bit of the book shop… better still, go to a different book shop.

And don’t just read, but write too. Write little and often. Get your steps in. It’ll help.