Even though it’s been almost a year since publishing, I’ll pretend like the lack of words never happened. I’ll leave the reason of my relaunch to a future post. So for now, let’s just blame spring.
I spent my Wednesday evening listening to an inspirational presentation of Griffin Farley from BBH arranged by APG Sweden. It’s no secret that the field of planning is quite vast in the US market if compared to the Swedish equivalent. Griffin enlighted us on two specific areas; propogation planning and fringe planning. Today I’ll focus on fringe planning so shortly: propogation planning could be summarized as planning not for the people you want to reach, but the people that they reach. Check out Griffin’s blog for more.
Fringe planning is about ideas and innovations that so far has played the part of the rejected and peripheral. It’s about solving real problems and not letting clients getting into the way of fantastic ideas. It’s about inspiring innovation and taking ideas that don’t get sold to the market.
Ad agencies and brand consulting firms are stepping into an area traditionally populated by venture capitalists, technology students and entrepreneurs. It’s a quite natural step. As new technologies enable people to come up with, create, produce, market och sell ideas easier than ever before other values than production capacity and financial investments are getting into play. The landscape opens up for fringe planners described by Griffin as part innovator, part technologist, part trend forecaster, part name specialist, part account planner and part community manager.
Developing new business ideas is about stepping away from solely pleasing customers, earning short term revenues and instead invest in ideas that in the long run might strongly outrun short term profit. This demands risk taking through the investment in both time and money. Agencies such as BBH (BBH ZAG) and Anomaly (Anomaly IP) are therefore establishing venture capital funds aiming on taking their ideas to the market.
Why has not this been done before? Well it has. But not in this structured and thought through way. Acne being a good example of a group of people driven by personal interest more than consumer insight. I remember discussing these kinds of questions with friends when I studied at Berghs without finding the answer on how to combine solving communication challenges for clients with realizing your own potential business ideas.
Fringe planning is about inventing products that customers want to buy and not only realizing ideas that are fun and inspiring. Combining creativity with business understanding and consumer insight is the recipe for success. And for agencies without a bag of gold coins in venture capital funds it’s about giving more room to the mix of creativity, madness, philosophy and business thinking. And hopefully find a client brave enough to carry out an idea or two.
Thank you Griffin some inspiring thoughts!
Check out Griffin’s presentation about fringe planning for more.
