(Picture Credits to the BBC Good Food) 

It’s Lent again, which means I’ve given up chocolate for 40 (ish) days.  To prove I can more than any particular religious leanings.

Talking about this with friends last night, I remembered this fascinating article about how willpower works, and how it is connected to our decision-making process, or immune system, and even how much sleep we’ve had.

Two things that occurred to me:

1. Will delayed gratification ever catch on with ‘Generation Right Now This Minute’?  If you need to practice willpower in order to be able to get good at it, where’s the motivation for a generation of people who’ve been brought up to believe that they can have whatever they what, whenever they want?

This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently – especially the pace that new products, upgrades and technology are released into the market.  Whatever happened to waiting patiently for something to be released – a book, a game, a new technology.  With Infinity Ward/Sledgehammer and Treyarch (and others where necessary) both working on COD there’s no gap to create anticipation (or a much shorter, more frenzied period).  Where’s the pressure to get good at waiting, to use your willpower?

I’d be interested to know how many people do try and give something up for Lent.  And related to my last post – is it just the people who know that they can.  The people who think they might fail at it won’t try anyway.

2. Secondly, and more practically, is this research proof that any attempt to give up chocolate is doomed?  I read this as meaning that we really we need to eat chocolate in order to be able to resist it…

(Picture credits to Columbia Pictures) 

I was reading a little while back about a school that is teaching people how to fail.

This is a brilliant idea.  I wish my school had done that.

It’s a life skill that you need to practice, but which the culture we live in seems to be making harder.

We test and examine children for nearly 5 consecutive years, 8 if you go to university (and I may be underestimating that total, as I’m only going on my own experience).  Whether it’s internal pressure, peer pressure, parental pressure, is there any wonder that it becomes paralysing?   And in most cases the pressures that people put on themselves are the worst of all.

And loser is one of the commonest insults in use.

Which is why I find the concept of ‘gamification’ genuinely worrying.  If everything becomes a competition – something that you can win at – then will we end up with people self selecting themselves out of participation?  Never trying something new because they worry too much about not being good at it?

The thing that hammered this all into context was an article I read this evening about unemployment – titled ‘I wouldn’t wish this on anyone’.  It made me stop and wonder how I’d manage if I was in the same situation.  When times get tougher, the number of people who can win is limited.

I find it interesting that with the unemployment rate so high - 8.4% – two-thirds of all those unemployed are women.  Is that something to do with a genetic makeup that makes us so risk averse? Or unable to deal with setbacks / failure?

And in general, if we get to a point where people don’t dare to try things, how will we get anything done?  And if you don’t know how to behave when failure (inevitably) occurs, how do you make sure that it doesn’t paralyse you.

It’s so hard to stand up, hold up your hands and say “well, that didn’t go very well really”. It’s even harder to (in the words of Batman Begins) learn to pick yourself back up and try something else.

Last night I went to see The Artist.  I have to confess, I wasn’t expecting to like the film as much as I did.  I thought it was going to be too clever and arty, and that it would fly straight over my head.  It’s black and white.  It’s silent.  It’s a bit experimental.  Was it going to be relevant?

Absolutely!  This is the best thing I’ve seen this year. And considering how young the year is, it’s the best thing I saw last year as well.  It’s that good.

This review from The Guardian probably about sums it up for me:

“Advancing age and retreating inhibition now make me liable to cry at the movies. But this has to be the first time I have actually wept tears of joy. It is not high camp exaggeration. This happens every time I watch the last sequence[...] I have become one of a global legion of jabbering evangelists, and only the fear of causing a backlash deters us from going on about its artistry more.”

The film got me thinking about how important words are anyway.

It’s said so often that I can’t even find a reference for it, but supposedly two-thirds of all communication is non-verbal.

Certainly when I was watching The Artist I didn’t miss words.  It was only mildly irritating right at the beginning that I could see people’s lips moving, and couldn’t quite work out what was being said.

It actually just means that you can interpret what’s happening even more. The lady that I went to see it with and I were talking about it on the way home; we’d both noticed completely different things and read things completely different ways.

One of the things I hate most about films sometimes is constant exposition – in case you missed the point that they were trying to make the first time around. Spelling out what is happening, and not crediting the audience with the ability to follow and understand what is happening. It interrupts the story – it makes you realise that it is a story and not just stuff that you are watching happen.

It’s really hard to have that level of exposition without all the words though. Which means the explanation is up to you. It doesn’t make it more difficult to watch. It actually makes it easier in some ways.

So, my advice this weekend is give The Artist a go. It’s clever, it’s heart-warming, and brilliantly different. Good luck to it at the Oscars.

And Uggie the dog deserves a best supporting actor trophy himself.

(Picture credits go to the BBC) 

Pretty much my favourite thing on TV this month has been the BBC’s Sherlock. I’ve loved it. (And I’m ridiculously glad that it’s going to be coming back for more. And not just because I can’t for the life of me work how it ended and I need it explaining…)

One thing that I caught myself thinking was that perhaps planners can be reminded of something by Sherlock. I know I can.

Looking at how people behave and what they are doing and not taking what they say at face value.  Which I know is what we always say we do, but as timescales get compressed and projects become pressing and there’s no budget for research it’s much harder to dig this out.

Looking beyond the obvious.  The little details of what people are doing, or how they are behaving, or interacting.  There are tensions underlying it all, and looking at it with a more questioning mind will help get down to that root cause. The example in the BBC’s version of Hound of the Baskervilles where he infers from the phone number on a napkin what the man is thinking… genius.

Taking it to Sherlock’s extreme would probably be a bad thing.  Not least from a ‘not able to interact with other human beings’ point of view.

That said, there are some quotes which have lodged in my brain as a good way to think about things.

Namely this one from The Copper Beeches -

“Data! Data! Data! I cannot make bricks without clay”

I’ve been writing a lot of proposals for projects recently. I find doing this really hard, mostly because I want to start to solve the problem straight away; coming up with ideas and theories. So perhaps this quote would be more pertinent:

“Never theorise before you have data. Invariably, you end up twisting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

More facts are needed, and in the right order. And more time is needed to look at what they really mean.

Now, not being in the market for a divorce myself, I’m not sure I’m exactly target audience… but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this particular bit of leafleting.  It’s irritated me, and I think I’ve started to work out why.

Is price something that really springs to mind when you are considering divorce?

Surely it’s something that you either want (whatever the cost) or you don’t.  Is suddenly putting a “10% off” offer on the process going to close the deal?  And wouldn’t the financial implications of a divorce go way beyond the £600 cost for getting it done in the first place?

Now I know that this is just a local firm, and they are probably doing the best thing for them in terms of raising awareness of the services that they are offering.  In fact, I hope that this has worked for them.  And there’s always the fact that I’m not target market and therefore maybe completely and utterly wrong.

But it did strike me as a great object lesson in appropriateness.

Sometimes having a great price, a differentiating incentive, or talking about something that no-one else is, just isn’t the right thing to do.

(Picture and title credit goes to The Beatles, obviously!) 

Gemma asked a little while back for some help from other planners documenting the sort of stuff we do on a day-to-day basis as part of her “Straight Talking Advice for Aspiring Planners” series.

I thought that it was only fair that I contribute, since this blog exists in large part due to one of those STAFAP posts that she wrote (think of this as my way of saying thank you!) and this is something in the way of being a 1 year anniversary of blogging.

In many ways I’m not really qualified to give advice.  Not least because I managed the unorthodox (and nearly unheard of) task of graduating and landing myself a role as a Planner straight away.  I am acutely aware that this is just not how it normally happens – so please don’t count on it.  I got really really lucky!

The following picture is also a little skewed.  I’m only two weeks into a brand new job, and a large part of my day-to-day activities have revolved around trying to remember people’s names/tea preferences (not one of my strong points) and being lost (the building is large and complicated).

But in the last two weeks (before Christmas) I have:

• Spent a weekend visiting the big 5 supermarkets to take surreptitious photos of the category and competitor products for a pitch we’re working on.
• Spent so long in one of the chilled aisles that staff actually came and I asked me if I was okay (real aim: observing how people were interacting with the category).
• Mystery shopped another pitch client’s retail offer to see how they measure up to what they say they’ll do.
• Spent about three days reading small print on websites and watching 10 years worth of ads to put together a competitor review looking at how the market dynamics have shifted and what competitors are claiming.  4 pages of tables and a fairly hefty PowerPoint document later I’ve proved what we probably already knew; everyone in that particular category is saying pretty much the same thing.
• Waded through two Mintel reports, a segmentation study, two qual research reports and a news archive.  Gotten geekily excited about some stats.  Been told by the people I sit with to stop being boring about the stats.  Tried to make the stats look more exciting in a presentation (so other people will see why they are interesting). Failed miserably to make graphs look more creative and redrawn them just the way they were.
• Been frustrated with Windows, because my very lovely new computer runs Office 2010 and I’ve lost the undo button, the crop button and the ‘make background invisible button’.
• Spent a couple of days writing two creative briefs and talking them through with the creative and design teams.
• Visited a client up in the remote Yorkshire Dales, spending 4 hours in a meeting, then 3 hours getting home because the road was snowed shut.
• Begun to work out the logistics of getting a consumer panel set up for a client.  Tried to explain to said client why Christmas might interfere with this, because people just aren’t thinking about things normally. Agreed that after Christmas might be a good time to start the project.
• Written and costed out three project proposals.  Realised that I’m probably being vastly optimistic in my time-frames if all three projects happen at once.  Rewritten three project proposals.
• Sent out multiple polls to colleagues, friends and family.  Realise I may have exhausted the goodwill in this approach for a little while.  Promise to bake cupcakes before I ask any more questions.
• Written and presented three pitches, to three clients, in three locations as far apart as London and Gateshead.

In the spirit of being helpful, and trying to give some advice to anyone who would like to be a planner, there are a couple of pieces of advice that I’ve been given over the years which might be helpful…

1. You need to work on taking ‘I’ out of the equation. Your job is to be a conduit between the creative team / client and the people you are talking to.  Your personal opinion (cruel as it may sound) just doesn’t matter, especially to start with.  What you bring to the table about your audience does.
2. It’s your job to make things as simple as possible.  This is bloody hard, frustrating, and it will take a long time.  Keep working at it though; there is always room for improvement.
3. This is not a 9-5 job.  Not just because of staying late for pitches, or getting in early to clear emails.  Every minute you are awake (and sometimes when you are asleep as well) you are exposed to things that can help you and you will end up having your best ideas out of work.  Fact.  So keep a pen, paper and a camera to hand at all times.
4. If you are finding something – a category, a client, a brief – boring, you are not doing your job right.  I’ve worked on cement, plus size catalogues for women in their 70s, artificial insemination for pigs, and paint primers.  There is something interesting about every category and every audience, and it is your job to be interested and find that thing.
5. Follow Gemma’s advice – a blog is one of the best ways to bounce ideas off other like-minded people.  It’s also a brilliant scrapbook of facts and figures that can be called on in emergencies!

I hope that this helps, and that it gives you a bit of a flavour of what it’s like to be working as a Planner up north. Good luck and Happy New Year!

And, judging from the way my Twitter stream has been filled with comments about polar bears and stone stealing penguins, I don’t think I’m alone… these days nearly 8 million viewers and a 31.4% share of audience at the peak of the series is not to be sneezed at.

It’s not just because it ended with this, beautiful, piece of cinematography:

The best thing (beyond even cute penguins and baby animals) for me has been a chance to see these places that I’d assumed were pretty barren and marvel at just how full of life they are.

And, as part of that, a chance to get to understand some of the weird and wonderful ways that life has adapted to be able to survive (and thrive) there.

An idea that I’ve been toying with for a while concerns just how well designed nature can be.  I was fascinated by this article from the BBC back in October that looks at how biomimicry is big in design terms.  Not just becuase there are some brilliant inventions in there (glass inspired by spider webs to stop birds flying into it?!)

There’s a bit in there that really puts things in perspective as well:

“It is important to look at nature – after all, it has had 3.8 billion years to come up with ideas”

One to remember when a client wants you to solve all of their problems in less than a week…

(The History of Science Fiction, from awesomeinfographics.com - click for a more detailed look, well worth it!) 

One of my all time guilty pleasures is science fiction.  Hard, soft, alternative timelines, fantasy, dystopian, post-apocalyptic.  You name it, it’s right there.  (Or if it isn’t, please tell me because I’d like something new to read).

I’d like to think that this interest is a natural extension of what I do everyday.

Looking at ideas about how things could be in the future, and imagining how people might react to those scenarios and situations.  When you put it like that, isn’t that just a definition of part of what planning is?

So it’s always puzzled me why people tend to look down their noses a bit at science fiction as a genre.

It’s a different way of exploring things that are interesting about how humans think.

And I love how people can think of things in books decades before they become reality:

For example that science fiction staple – tractor beams.  Or the existence of other worlds similar to our own. And today the idea that they might be able to clone a woolly mammoth - a la Jurassic Park.

So why is it a genre that is looked down on as trashy by a large majority of people? I read an interesting commentary from Robert J Sawyer on the discovery of Kepler-22b.  In particular this element:

“In October 2011, the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency invited me and nine other science-fiction writers to share our visions with scientists and engineers at the first public symposium for The 100 Year Starship Project, an initiative to get human beings to a planet outside our Solar System within a century.”

This is something that so many science fiction books deal with, because of the vast distances in space.  And I love the idea that the writers might be able to imagine a solution to the problem.

Which got me wondering, which comes first? Do authors imagine things beyond the realm of possibility, and scientists work towards achieving them. Or does the science exist (at a conceptual level) and the authors are borrowing this ahead of time.  The link between imagination and invention is so close.  So where is the line between fact and fiction?

It was nice for a change to be just be looking around, as it’s not really my usual mentality in a supermarket.  (Mostly I’m shopping in situations which aren’t really conducive to speculative browsing - on a lunchtime, or on my way home from work, or the dreaded Saturday morning shop when every other person in the whole wide world has had the same idea as you).

And I spotted these:

(Picture creds go to Design Week)

Actually, to be more specific I just spotted the Turkish Almond one, because all the others were completely sold out.

It got me thinking.

Dip is a category that seems to be completely dominated by own label.  I’m not sure I could name another brand that’s operating in this aisle.  But the branded strategy seems to be working for Glorious – judging from the lack of product on the shelf.

While the flavours are more exotic than the standard ones that you normally see, the key thing that’s probably helping Glorious here is the design.  This really stands out on the shelf.

But it goes past that as well.  This is a product that appears to have really thought about the customer and how they are using the product.  Dip is something that is designed to be shared.  It helps that these look a lot classier than your average dip… you wouldn’t need to decant them if you had people round – and people would know what flavour it is too.

It reminded me just how much I love Glorious’s packaging in general because it turns around the category conventions; rather than being about the ingredients they are about the adventurous flavours and exotic tastes – so there’s no disconnect when they move into different aisles. Soups, sauces, dips – it doesn’t feel too much like a stretch.

I love the illuminated letters on the packs as well – very striking, and an ingenious way to get across the culture without being cliched.

(Picture Creds go to the fdin)

The Turkish Almond dip was yummy as well.  Two enthusiastic thumbs up!

The thing that has been fascinating me in particular is this question: where does the tipping point for participation lie?

Something small enough that you feel that you have a chance of winning, or something big enough that it represents something that you simply wouldn’t achieve on your own?  Something that it doesn’t take you too long to enter, or something that requires some thought and imagination?

But then it isn’t just size of the prize, I’ve got a hunch that it’s a lot to do with relevance as well.

Today I saw this ad for the New Covent Garden Soup range, with a message about a prize on offer: “Win a Farm!”

(Incidentally, there don’t appear to be any more details on the main New Covent Garden website, instead everything is on this microsite)

I can understand that this prize would be supporting their brand message – all about homegrown, wholesome and British – but it does seem to jar with who they are targeting.

This is a brand whose product is all about convenience; bringing those qualities (and very nice soup) to people who don’t have the time to grow their own veg or prepare soup from scratch. Why would these people want a farm?

In fact, when you read the small print the prize is actually £500,000 in cash. And my hunch is that is probably much more useful in the long run to the majority of people who are buying the product … and more motivating.

What’s the most motivating prize you’ve seen recently? (Mine would be the asos FashionFriendsy – £500 a month to spend on site for the full year, for me and three friends.  It certainly feels more relevant to my interests, and demonstrates perhaps that the brand gets what I want from them)