Advertising: Are you Adding Value to your Customer through Account Planning?

Your customer can be your best copywriter. Provided her voice is heard loud and clear during the process of creating your advertising. The critical link can be forged by the account planner at your agency, whose job is to offer insights into consumer behaviour to the client-servicing and creative people. So, don't leave your account without a planner.

PLANNING AT WORK - I

Planners created a new product for Johnson & Johnson (J&J). The mediator: Ammirati Puris Lintas' account-planning model, LinSolutions, which was used to mine customer behaviour for the one lode of unique need that J&J could use in its marketing. Research had suggested that the motivator for customers to switch from home-made to branded feminine hygiene products was convenience. But since its rivals were aware of that as well, J&J wasn't making much progress. So, the agency invoked LinSolutions, which used a three-step process-identify the right positioning through quantitative data, the right motivator through qualitative data, and the right creative cues to convey this motivation to the customer-to home in on a vital discovery: the user would go to any lengths to protect herself and her family from public embarrassment. The result: suitable advertising, as well as a sub-brand, Stayfree Secure.

It may not have worked for the economy, but it will work for your brand. Does your customer create your advertising? Does she determine the content of your communications? When it comes to advertising, is Lalitaji your only advisor? In the customer-controlled market-place, the answers should not be in doubt. But converting strategic intent into tactical action will always be. Unless, that is, your ad agency uses a new tool: account planning.

Peripheral at most agencies until recently, the importance of listening to the customer's voice-and integrating it into both the strategic as well as the creative components of advertising-is fast gaining ground. If your agency has not put a planner on your account, your Ps may be out of kilter with your customer's priorities. Indeed, account planning could just be the new source of competitive differentiation between the advertising for rival products. Points out R.K. Caprihan, 52, the Marketing Director of the Rs 753.81-crore LML Vespa: ''It never hurt when we didn't have a planner around. But it's only after you've worked with one that you realise the significant value-addition she brings. Often, the planner throws up category nuances and competitive perspectives that have been completely missed by the rest of the brand-management team.'' Telling.

That's why at least 12 of the Top Twenty agencies have formal account-planning departments. As do 60 per cent of the country's ad-shops. However, the nomenclature alone does not guarantee the delivery of the genuine Mc Coy. Only in agencies that use the technique effectively do the planners provide insights into the behaviour of the consumer to determine a brand's Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

Dismiss them as survey numbers and regression charts only at your peril. For, the research reveals it all: the whos, the wheres, and the whens of your customer's purchases. What it won't tell you is why: why customers use your brand, why they are not using more of your products, why your brand's USP must change to attract more buyers. These are the critical gaps that account planning seeks to bridge, both for the company and the agency. Sums up Rajiv Karwal, 34, the Vice-President (Marketing) of the Rs 130-crore LG Electronics: ''Account planning enhances the agency's involvement in strategic issues relating to your brand and your category. The planner also translates your marketing objectives into consumer language for the creatives.''

On the face of it, the need for such information may appear to be of hardly any consequence. But it is. If it has not been a part of your processes so far, blame it on the agency's classic structure, which bifurcated them into two-and only two-streams: client-servicing, and creative. Neither, though, has a large stake in ensuring that the communication actually tells the consumer the one thing that she, given the complexity of her decision-making, will be most strongly influenced by. While client-servicing people tend to focus on translating the corporate's needs into strategy, creative people concentrate on converting the strategy into creative execution. In the process, the validity of the objectives remains unchecked.

Sensing the vacuum, ad pro Stanley Pollitt, who ran the American agency, Boase Massimi Pollitt, wrote in a seminal article on account planning: ''It seemed wrong to me that it should be the account man who decided what data should be applied to ad-planning, and if a researcher was needed. Partly because account men are rarely competent to do this, but more dangerously since, as my own account management experience had shown, clients, on the one hand, and creative direction, on the other, made one permanently tempted to be expedient.''

Invented almost simultaneously by Pollitt in the US, and by J. Walter Thompson's branding guru, Stephen King, in the UK, account planning brings a range of benefits to your brand-building process. To one agency, it is the objective conscience of the brand: the consumer's voice translated into insights for the creative and strategy teams to factor in. At another, account planning is directed at imparting focus to creative briefs; instead of offering a panoply of customer responses, it homes in on the specific needs that can be addressed through the communication. To a third, planning is a device that helps authenticate the strategic direction picked by the marketers.

Vitally, in each of these cases, the customer's involvement is the dimension that adds value to the process. Adds Vineet Agarwal, 36, the Vice-President (Marketing) of the Rs 1,278-crore Wipro Consumer Products: ''Account planning is, probably, the most realistic way of facilitating long-term thinking on a brand by an agency. Despite their capabilities and best intentions, account managers are bound by deadlines. Having a planning team leads to debate and alternative views.'' Indeed, the richness of roles that your planner can play demonstrates why you should insist that your agency assigns one to your brand.

PLANNING AT WORK - II

Planners reinvented the scooter for lml Vespa. Unable to help the company carve out a distinct position from the market leader, Bajaj Auto, LML's advertising agency, FCB-Ulka, turned to its planners for help. Cleverly, the planners did not probe consumers on what they wanted, but first mapped the extent of the benefits that Bajaj Auto held out for scooter-users. Their conclusion: the market leader was firmly entrenched as a down-to-earth product. Accordingly, FCB-Ulka went on to check the possibility of a positioning associated with the exact opposite-and found that consumers were, indeed, receptive to the idea of having their staid perception of the scooter changed. The attributes they rated strongly: power and style. And the agency built them into its new communication for the LML Vespa, securing the uniqueness of association it had been seeking.

Planning institutionalises knowledge within an agency. Tracking market trends and consumer insights, and understanding the target audience create a pool of data that is available continuously. For instance, when Ammirati Puris Lintas (1996-97 billings: Rs 451.38 crore) was creating the advertising for the Rs 424-crore Johnson & Johnson's brand, Stayfree, it was its account-planning model, LinSolutions, that threw up from its databases the one crucial customer insight that became the pivot for the campaign: the user's wish to avoid public embarrassment.

Undoubtedly, the planner is a source of information for the rest of the brand management team. By proactively disseminating information at decision-points, she triggers off fresh thought-processes. That's how Hindustan Thompson Associates' (HTA, 1997-98 billings: Rs 780 crore) planners on the Rs 8,343-crore Hindustan Lever's Lux account discovered a lateral solution to the brand's problems. Having relied on its association with film stars over the decades, Lux, suddenly, found that plank usurped by the much-cheaper Nirma Beauty soap. Swinging into action, the planners discovered that consumers really wanted not a different image, but a better product from Lux. And the advertising promptly played up the changes in the product formulation rather than the star content.

Although not the brand custodian in the agency, the planner teams up with the client-servicing people to interpret the client's brief, and helps draw up the creative brief, listing the marketing objectives thrown up from the consumer's behaviour. Take the case of the Rs 757-crore LML, which had been trying to find a way of stepping out of the shadows of the market leader, the Rs 3,454-crore Bajaj Auto. Conventional thinking had offered alternative USPs that were only marginally different from Bajaj Auto's safety platform. It was not until FCB-Ulka (1997-98 billings: Rs 310 crore) threw in an account-planning team that a different source of differentiation emerged: even though the product was a staid one, revealed the planners' insights, customers wanted style and power. And this was quickly translated into a new creative strategy for LML Vespa.

Invariably, the planner's insights stretch from the present into the future, enabling her to extrapolate trends into predictions about the brand, the market, and the customer-and how companies can respond proactively. For instance, FCB-Ulka's advertising for Wipro's soap-brand, Santoor, benefited from the inputs from the account- planning team by waking up to the need for a credible spokesperson in the communication, especially after the competition hotted up.

Ultimately, the planner looks at the client's needs beyond communications. She could be the pivot in the transformation of the ad agency's services: from communication management to total branding. In fact, Contract Advertising (1997-98 billings: Rs 180 crore) used planning with great effect for its branding of the Kotak Mahindra Finance's (1997-98 income: Rs 358 crore) auto-finance business. Its planners identified as many as 15 critical dimensions along which the product could be positioned to match the claims made by the slugline, Driven By You.

Given this rainbow of pay-offs, how can you ensure that your brand soaks them up? It may have its own algorithms, but account planning at your agency will really add value to your brand only when it is less concerned with its internal sequence, and more with finding new ways to map the customer's mind. It is simple to reduce the process into well-defined stages of collecting, collating, analysing, and presenting data, ignoring, in the process, the real value-addition that customer insights should be making to the brand. Warns Michael Llewellyn-Williams, Director Of Account Planning at the San Francisco-based ad agency, Ketchum: ''It is easy to become so enamoured of the process that you forget to re-challenge regularly the presumptions on which it is based, particularly when the circumstances cry out for thinking and acting outside the box.''

That is not to negate the value of a pre-defined process. Warns Ammirati Puris Lintas' Director of Strategic Planning, Asit Mehta, 37: ''Usually, agencies overlook the importance of setting up a process, or tool-kit, to begin with. This puts the onus on individual aptitude to do justice to account planning, which can be a problem.'' But the crucial issue, as Contract's Account Planning Director Rohit Srivastava, 32, points out, is not the how of account planning, but the how of translating its findings into action. ''It is more important to outline the role of account planning, and where it fits into the entire advertising process instead of focusing on carefully-controlled steps and tools to do your job,'' he says.

To check if your agency is doing it right, the benchmarks are easy to identify. Collecting and collating information is a continuous process, not a need-based one. So, the account planners must monitor different sources of information-economic surveys, international research studies, and extensive primary and secondary data-and crystallise them into in-depth insights on an on-going basis. Instead of the occasional burst of data, there should be a constant flow of information for the strategists and creative people to use. This open-ended process constantly renews perspective, facilitating change.

The second stage is using the information to re-validate the present strategies. Thus, the best users of account planning convene regular brand review meetings between the planners and the members of the client-servicing and creative teams. Opines Kavita Gadkari, 27, Supervisor (Account Planning) at FCB-Ulka, which practises multi-functional brand reviews: ''Each function brings a different perspective to the brand thinking. It is only through debates-where the planner is, often, able to present connections between unrelated categories, which leads to different lines of thinking-that the true agency perspective emerges.''

It's not easy to make the planner and the account executive deliver the best results. Be warned: their roles, invariably, result in conflict. Those roots go back to the fact that account planning, although a descendant of research, is different in one crucial way: while research is a support function, planning is a line-function. In other words, account planning is directly involved in adding value to the process of advertising. As Mehta points out: ''The planner must throw consumer insights into the ad development process-not just offer those insights for use if required.''

That could lead to a situation where the planner forward-integrates from his original mandate to usurp the strategising role as well. As the client, you could be the loser. Ensure, therefore, that neither you nor your agency slots account planning as simply research or simply strategising. Cautions Meera Patwardhan, 38, Director, HTA: ''Both are too extreme to be effective. For planning to work, it must integrate with creative and client-servicing in working out advertising strategy.''

Equally important, insist that the consumer perspectives generated by the planners are injected all along the creative development path. Despite the integration, remember to tailor your interaction with individuals according to their assigned roles. ''The close working relationship between the planner and the account executive should not be confused with interchangeability,'' says HTA's Patwardhan. Your account executive is still your first point of contact; only when she does not have the answers are you justified in interacting directly with the planner. Don't forget, either, that while the planner may know your category better than anyone else, it's your account executive who knows your brand the best. That's why their abilities must be pooled.

Account Planning isn't an easy skill to hone. The best planners earn their spurs in conventional market research, but usually bring to their jobs an eclectic understanding of numbers and behaviour, displaying a rare grasp over mathematics and psychology, sociology and statistics. And smart agencies back them with budgets of as high as Rs 1 crore, considerable freedom over technique, and a mandate to offer their insights to the servicing and creative people as equals-not as consultants.

Even so, is not an account executive dedicated to your account a better source, of insights than a planner who, probably, has to justify her salary by working on several brands, at the same time? Admits Contract's Srivastava: ''The planner's is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, she must merge seamlessly into the ad-making system and, on the other, she must bring something to the table that was not there before.''

Perhaps the USP, in this case, is that the planner is armed with the customer's verdict-the one weapon that can give your advertising a competitive edge. Even if it interferes with the creation of your communication, therefore, the customer's voice cannot be ignored. That's why you need your account to be planned-not merely managed or serviced by your ad agency.

PLANNING AT WORK - III

Its account planners brought Kotak Mahindra Finance an entire marketing solution for its auto-financing scheme. Contract Advertising's planners delved into the needs of the consumer and his purchase patterns to shortlist 15 different dimensions along which the new product could drive into the buyer's mind as a user-friendly brand, in keeping with the slugline, Driven By You. Only 6 of the 15 were communications-related: the rest were product- and service-related. But Contract just didn't stop here; its planners went on to translate their insights into benchmarking the service component of the package to get it up to the top of the scale. That involved mapping all the tangible dimensions of the consumer-brand-client interface, and benchmarking each activity against the best-in-class. Ultimately, almost the entire product was designed and marketed from the inputs provided by the planners.