Russell's Planning School on the Web

"People learn the most when teaching others." Peter F. Drucker, 1909-2005

Russell Davies, planning professor and guru, has posted his thoughts on the first eight of the seventeen planning briefs he received for his first assignment, read everything here.

I'm going to throw down my first thoughts and impressions with this warning - I'm not as experienced or as diplomatic as Russell.

Overall:

I enjoyed reading Russell's comments much more than the briefs. He gives good advice and walks the walk too:

- "make me want to read the stuff"
"...more concise"
"...wasn't well summed up"
"...give memorable distillations of your thinking"

-- all of which would be great advice for a blogger, if she would only listen...

I disagreed with Russell on one point. There wasn't much (any) demonstration of "planning rigour".

I wanted someone to say "based on our original research" or "we used a new research methodology to explore attitudes" or "the competitive frame is huge and includes a spectrum of food stuffs from Pot Noodles (that slag) to elite epicurean microwaveable ready meals (that ponce).

I'm a big fan of ethnography and just starting to re-think how to apply psychological advances to the lowly group discussion plus ok, yes, bit of a math geek. So where was the data collection and analysis? In my book, that's Account Planning 101.

When I first thought about the assignment I came up with a number of positioning ideas:

1. The ultimate comfort food
2. The cutting edge/cult statusey baked bean
3. Mrs. Boolez as the Jo Malone of baked beans
4. The opposite of chocolate
5. The healthy slag of snacks

Original research would probably discover that none of those worked!

My reactions:

Of all the submissions I read, I liked the 'Great British Bean' positioning the best. It reminded me that Heinz = Teresa which probably didn't occur to the author. But the Boston Tea party wasn't a British political act so I got a bit sidetracked.

"We tell the truth" could be dangerous as beans = obesity could be a truthful statement.

I didn't like the idea of making a documentary of the brief. Good documentaries are hard to make, time consuming and expensive. A killer insight trumps everything.

Interesting idea - making "global warming" a good thing. After all, we are talking about beans.

I never saw the £5 million budget being used for tv. The media choice would be based on the key target market and I didn't see these uber beans being for "kids" or "younger people". That's where research provides inspiration and persuasion for alternative media.

Bottom line? Russell has given those planners and all of us, million dollar advice with no thought of reward.

Thank you on Thanksgiving Day.