Les Binet and Sarah Carter, How Not To Plan
In 2010, Les Binet and Sarah Carter began publishing a monthly ‘myth busting’ article for AdMap.
18 years later, and with support from the APG, Binet and Carter collated 66 of these essays to form the book ‘How Not To Plan’.
Here’s eight of the book’s lessons that resonated with me most:
Myth 01 - Brands should clearly define their segment: Markets are much less segmented than people think. We all use a repertoire of brands. You compete with every brand in the market to some extent. The threat from competitors is largely a matter of size. Your biggest competitors will be the biggest brands in the market. Even if you think they are in a different segment.
Myth 02 - Brands should seek to increase loyalty: According to the IPA data bank, most loyalty campaigns don’t work. And on the rare occasions when they do, they mostly do so by accidentally increasing penetration. To maximise growth and profitability, talking to your existing customers isn’t enough. You need to talk to everyone in your category and you need to do this with communication that strengthens peoples relationship with your brand, and their willingness to pay for it.
Myth 03 - Brands can alienate audiences: Binet and Carter have been evaluating advertising for years, and yet they can’t think of a single campaign that appealed to new users but actively turned regular users away. Despite what you think real people don’t have strong opinions about brands. They just don’t care enough to feel alienated by them. So don’t hold back from bold, provocative ideas through fear of alienation. You should be much more fearful of indifference and that’s wonderfully liberating creatively.
Myth 04 - Price promotions have a long term effect on sales: Analysis of electronic point-of-sale data often suggests that price-related promotions increase short-term sales by 30% to 70%. But many of these apparently incremental sales, are not. Some may be cannibalised from other pack sizes of the same brand others may be diverted from stores where the brand is not on promotion and others could be just future sales bought forward by the offer. Research has failed to find much evidence of any long-term benefit from price promotions.
Myth 05 - Consumers think carefully about their purchases: We spend our days immersed in the final details of clients products. But real people just don’t care about any of this stuff. As far as real people are concerned, nearly all purchases are low interest. People are interested in their families, friends, jobs, weekend plans and celebrity gossip – not brands or products. Occasionally they may rouse themselves to consider which wine to buy for a special dinner. Or which mobile phone to buy for a teenage daughter’s birthday. But most of us don’t devote much brain power to buying anything. We’ve got too many other more important or interesting things to think about.
Myth 06 - Differentiation is more important than distinctiveness: Don’t confuse saying something different with saying something in a different way. Difference is less important than distinctiveness. A distinctive piece of communication on a category benefits will usually be more effective than a bland piece of communication on a differentiated positioning. Analysis of the IPA Data Bank suggests that, while branding is key to long-term profit, campaigns focusing on differentiation underperform. Don’t focus on saying something different. Instead, think about how you can say something differently.
Myth 07 - Consistency no longer matters: Leo Burnett once said, “I have learned that any old fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a genius to keep his hands off of a good one”. Marketing and agency people get fed up with campaigns long before real people do. One of the hardest marketing skills to master is the art of leaving well alone. Campaigns, even individual executions, take much longer to wear out than often feared. Having studied decades of econometric analysis on the subject one major advertiser recently concluded that the idea of ‘wear out’ is a myth.
Myth 08 - Advertising is not a safe investment: It’s hard to fail disastrously when it comes to advertising. In over 30 years of evaluation research, Binet and Carter have not seen a single example of a campaign that has been shown to have a negative effect on sales. Not one. One reason it’s so hard to fail is what psychologists call the ‘mere exposure effect’. Exposing people to any ad for a brand, even just the brand’s logo, will increase propensity to choose that brand. Ads tends to work better if people like them, of course. But even advertising that’s disliked can be effective. Yes, advertising is unpredictable. It’s never possible to know in advance exactly how the public will react to communication until it’s out there. And in that sense, it’s always risky. But a far bigger risk comes from things we can control and doing nothing is usually the biggest risk of all.
The full book covers these eight myths along with 58 more.
Highly recommended.
Pick up your copy here.