Planned spontaneity: why great campaigns need more than just data

When it comes to campaign planning, timing is a large part of the process. However, in this day and age, when your 15 minutes of fame is now a five second Vine or when a brand’s reputation goes from hero to zero in one day, agility and spontaneity is key.

Planning in this environment requires a whole whack of assumptions and the key to campaign success is truly listening to your customer… all the time. If design thinking starts with empathy then we really need a method and tools to ensure that we are always listening, not only when a campaign is due. Sure, your social media agency will be selling you “always-on”, listening and reacting using free tools, like Hootsuite and more premium offerings like Radian 6 or Meltwater, but don’t let this fool you — the more data, the more people needed to know how to read and understand the data.

This kind of investment in big data, the technical tools to compute the data and the hands-on resources to draw insights isn’t really a focus within South African organisations and, more importantly, within agencies. Big data is essential to today’s marketing departments because when analysed correctly it can provide insights about your customer and even predict certain behaviours.

But, it’s not the silver bullet. Yes, we are creatures of habit and if we are given certain input we tend to respond with similar outputs, but we are also emotional beings and our behaviour can sometimes be unpredictable.

As quickly as one can pull the data one needs to be able change tack. This means organisations not only have to be brave and daring but also have to be agile with a skipper they trust and to be able to relinquish control when necessary. This is Planned Spontaneity – a lean version of traditional planning. It allows us to create certain milestones with the ability to adapt the campaign as we learn more about the failures and success.

Perhaps we need to reinvent marketing in the digital age. Perhaps we need to think about marketing from a design prototyping point of view. Marketing prototyping could be developing communication on the fly based on relevant, real time needs that lands a brand proposition in the mind of the consumer in order to drive sales or an action. The minimum viable message would be sufficient to begin with but would improve through consistent feedback loops built before the campaign or project went live.

The draw back is that you wouldn’t have a big bang message, which is great for awareness. You would need to have a slower build. For example, if you want to change people’s buying habits to increase the volume of items sold. Find new markets or new product uses would be the key starting point. Identify this and you can implement, however what if you made this, strategic phase, part of a campaign? You ask your consumers and communities, publically to participate in change.

Mobile operator Cell C attempted this during its “CEO” campaign with comedian Trevor Noah and, although changed perception, struggled to drive switching behaviour. In my opinion, they missed the mark by not being transparent and honest enough. It could have worked if it actually made the changes that people were suggesting or at least provide feedback to participants — so no one really knew if it was serious or just advertising.

Before the planners start rolling in their proverbial graves, I am not saying you don’t need medium and long terms plans. You do need good planning and foresight to effectively implement but make room for spontaneity, allowing your team to take advantage of opportunities when presented to you and your brand.

Image: Garry Wilmore via Flickr.