A Master Class in Brand Planning

In 1988, on Stephen King’s retirement JWT published ‘The King Papers’ a small collection of Stephen King’s published writings spanning 1967-1985. They remain timelessly potentially valuable but are an almost unexploited gold mine. This book is comprised of a selection of 20-25 of Stephen King’s most important articles, each one introduced by a known and respected practitioner who, in turn, describes the relevance of the particular original idea to the communications environment of today.

The worth of this material is that, although the context in which the original papers were written is different, the principles themselves are appropriate to marketing communications in today’s more complex media environment.

The book will serve as a valuable reference book for today’s practitioners, as well as a unique source of sophisticated, contemporary thinking.

Introduction xi

About the Book: How it Happened xv

Acknowledgements xvii

About the Contributors xix

Part I Planning: Role and Structure 1

1 Who Do You Think You Are? 3
Malcolm White

1.1 The Anatomy of Account Planning (Stephen King) 7

1.2 The Origins of Account Planning (John Treasure) 13

1.3 How I Started Account Planning in Agencies (Stanley Pollitt) 19

2 How Brands and the Skills of Branding have Flowered 23
Rita Clifton

2.1 What is a Brand? (Stephen King) 27

3 The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance 41
Rory Sutherland

3.1 Advertising: Art and Science (Stephen King) 45

4 The Market’s Evolved, Why Hasn’t Planning? 59
Merry Baskin

4.1 Strategic Development of Brands (Stephen King) 63

5 Learning and Improvement, Not Proof and Magic Solutions 69
William Eccleshare

5.1 Improving Advertising Decisions (Stephen King) 73

6 The Media Planner’s Revenge 87
Marco Rimini

6.1 Inter-media Decisions: Implications for Agency Structure (Stephen King) 91

Part II Planning: Craft Skills 105

7 A Revolutionary Challenge to Conventional Wisdom 107
Paul Feldwick

7.1 What Can Pre-testing Do? (Stephen King) 111

8 Four of the Wisest Principles You Will Ever Read 119
Simon Clemmow

8.1 Practical Progress from a Theory of Advertisements (Stephen King) 123

9 JWT’s Debt to Stephen King 139
Guy Murphy

9.1 In Pursuit of an Intense Response (Rosemarie Ryan and Ty Montague) 141

9.2 Advertising Idea (Stephen King – from JWT Toolkit) 145

9.3 JWT Engagement Planning in China: The Art of Idea Management (Tom Doctoroff) 153

10 Short-Term Effects may be Easier to Measure but Long-Term Effects are More Important 159
Tim Broadbent

10.1 Setting Advertising Budgets for Lasting Effects (Stephen King) 163

Part III Market Research 173

11 A Theory that Built a Company 175
Mike Hall

11.1 Can Research Evaluate the Creative Content of Advertising? (Stephen King) 179

12 The Great Bridge Builder: Searching for Order out of Chaos 195
Creenagh Lodge

12.1 Advertising Research for New Brands (Stephen King) 199

13 You Can’t Make Sense of Facts until you’ve Had an Idea 209
Kevin McLean

13.1 Applying Research to Decision Making (Stephen King) 213

14 Measuring Public Opinion in an Individualistic World 227
Chris Forrest

14.1 Conflicts in Democracy: The Need for More Opinion Research (Stephen King) 231

15 The Perfect Role Model for Researchers Today 237
David Smith

15.1 Tomorrow’s Research (Stephen King) 241

Part IV Marketing – General 253

16 Old Brands Never Die. They Just get Sold for a Huge Profit 255
Martin Deboo

16.1 What Makes New Brands Succeed? (Stephen King) 259

17 The Retail Revolution gets Underway 279
Andrew Seth

17.1 What’s New about the New Advertisers? (Stephen King) 283

18 A Robust Defence of what Brand Advertising is For 295
Stephen Carter

18.1 New Brands: Barriers to Entry? (Stephen King) 299

19 The Train to Strawberry Hill (1744) 307
Hugh Burkitt

19.1 Has Marketing Failed, or was it Never Really Tried? (Stephen King) 311

20 A Challenge to Change Behaviour 327
Neil Cassie

20.1 Brand Building in the 1990s (Stephen King) 331

Resumé of Stephen King’s life 341

Index 345

"Every planner needs this book - and the brave ones will give it to their clients, too." (Admap, November 2007)

"A valuable reference book for today's practitioners, as well as a unique source of sophisticated, contemporary thinking." (Retail & Leisure International, December 2007)

"...a good book to keep beside your desk...it will help to clear the mind as an ongoing mental workout." (Market Leader, Winter 2007)

Stephen King was a genuinely original thinker. He began his career in JWT (J. Walter Thompson) in London in 1959, retired from the agency in 1988 and spent the next 4 yeas at WPP. In addition, he spent 7 years as a director of the Henley Centre and was a Visiting Professor of Marketing at the Cranfield School of Management. During his career, he pioneered an entirely new organizational structure to support his ideas and philosophy – the importance of function called account planning and role of the account planner in creating advertising. It was a structure that was copied by agencies around the world. Stephen died in February 2006, leaving a legacy of articles and books about marketing, advertising, research and brand communications written over a thirty year period, which have influenced advertising people around the world. He is remembered as a leading intellectual figure in the world of communications strategy.

Judie Lannon isa Marketing Communications and Research Consultant. The major part of her career was with JWT London where she was Research and Planning Director for JWT Europe before leaving to set up her own consultancy. In addition to working with clients on branding projects, she is editor of Market Leader, the journal of the Marketing Society and on editorial board of the International Journal of Advertising

Merry Baskin, after several years as one of the industry’s top planning directors (including running the UK’s largest planning department at JWT and America’s coolest at Chiat/Day New York), founded her own strategic planning consultancy, Baskin Shark (where brands move forward or die!) in 2000. She also works with the APG and American Association of Advertising Agencies providing training for the advertising and marketing industry, and account planers in particular. She remains one of the leading lights behind the renaissance and expansion of the Account Planning Group (APG) both in the UK and overseas (UK Chairman 1998-2000).

In 1988, on Stephen King’s retirement JWT published ‘The King Papers’, a small collection of Stephen King’s published writings spanning 1967-1985. They remain timelessly valuable but are an unexploited gold mine. This book is comprised of a fuller selection: 20 of Stephen King’s most important articles. Each one is introduced by a known and respected practitioner who, in turn, describes the relevance of the article to the communications environment of today.

Although the context in which the original papers were written was different, the worth of this material is that the principles underlying his thinking are entirely appropriate to marketing communications in today’s more complex media environment.

The book serves as a valuable reference book for today’s practitioners, as well as a unique source of sophisticated, contemporary thinking.

‘What is a Brand?’ by Stephen King was one of the most influential pieces of work ever and has had a lasting influence on the way in which I think about brands. A few years ago I had the extraordinary experience of re-visiting the video of it made by Stephen and Jeremy Bullmore and the stunning thing was how prescient they had been some thirty years previously. Indeed, the only thing they had not foreseen was the internet – everything else they got right. —Hamish Pringle, Director General, IPA

Martin Mayer, the well-known investigative journalist, has described the present-day American advertising business more accurately than any other writer. He did this in his book Whatever Happened to Madison Avenue? Advertising in the ‘90s. I quote from page 191: “Thompson in London had become what Ogilvy was the first to call ‘a teaching hospital,’ where the researcher Stephen King developed philosophies of branding that were carried to America by John Philip Jones and Timothy Joyce.”

There is very little doubt today that branding is at the top of most marketing professionals’ minds in the United States. But “top of mind” is not quite the same as “in the bloodstream.” Packaged goods advertisers in the United States are currently forced to spend three timesas much money below the line on price cutting, as above the line on brand-building media advertising. It is to be hoped that the book of Stephen’s papers will inject a powerful serum into the bloodstream of American marketers, to help them develop a strategic response to the power of the retail trade which is at the moment debilitating and even emasculating many American brands. —John Philip Jones, Professor, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, New York, USA

King’s relentless thirst to understand, rigour of questioning and breadth of learning remain an inspiration. A profoundly rewarding, and rather humbling read. —Adam Morgan, author of Eat the Big Fish, and The Pirate Inside

In a world of greasers and drama queens, Stephen King was the still small voice of reason. Ever polite and ever intelligent, his analysis provided real insights. We all learned from him and this book should enable many more to do so. —Tim Ambler, MA (Oxford) SM (MIT), Senior Fellow, Marketing, LBS

Stephen was a great interpreter of research and a great judge of when to use specific methodologies whether they were qualitative or quantitative. He was comfortable with both. He was and remains a very great inspiration to market researchers in companies and in research and ad agencies. Dr Liz Nelson OBE

King writes of our industry, at its best, representing “Creative imagination subjected to critical control.” He could have been describing his own mind and approach, which have inspired generations of brand managers and planners and remain deeply relevant today. This book should be required reading for everyone entering the business, and serve as a reminder to the rest of us that however high we think we have set our standards, they are probably not high enough. —Jon Steel, Planning Director, WPP