Michael Karnjanaprakorn

Former Director of Connection Planning at Fallon, John King, wrote a great article about Connection Planning in the new issue of Contagious Magazine. Unfortunately, you will not be able to access it without a subscription but here are some great quotes that I’ve pulled out of it.

“Overall, I left the Big Easy with four major themes for how connection planning is helping shape the future of marketing: 

1) Brand Action – As a whole, most of the speakers would have agreed with the sentiment, ‘I’m so over messages. I want to build brands that do something for people.’ A common theme was that, in today’s world, it’s ridiculous that 90% of budgets are still spent on the distribution of advertising via media leaving little money to be spent actually building an idea in the world. It’s time to shift the pendulum away from delivery and toward doing.

2) Brand about ideas – It seems the job is shifting from ideas about brands toward creating brands about ideas.

3) Communications karma – With the emergence of Gen Y, there seems to be great reward for companies to do the right thing in the world. Gen Y has tremendous scale, and overall we’re seeing a shift from ‘me’ to ‘we’ because this group tends to be more other-oriented. This shift leads to an increased faith in the idea that if your company or brand does a bit of good in the world, it will be good for your business.

4) Brands as candidates – We’ve long said brands exist between the ears of the consumer. For this reason, the best results seem to have happened when the brand acted like a person too. This thinking would help us get past the advertising model of saying three things once a year because that’s not how we as people would build a relationship. But brands as person isn’t good enough; in today’s increasingly complex media world, brands need to behave a lot more like political candidates.

In summary, marketing is about to get really hard. Connection planning plays a key role in making sure it also gets really interesting for the consumer as well as for communications companies who believe their job is to build ideas in the world, not to deliver messages.”

Agreed. All great points in the article. I left the conference thinking that Connection Planning is a philosophy + process and not a title. It’s not something you can tack onto one department to implement within your company. It’s a philosophy of how your company should think to innovate the future of marketing and communications. It starts pushing agencies to start thinking around ideas and no longer around ads. Connection Planning is not a replacement for channel/media/communications planning. Like King said, “it’s to build ideas in the world, not to deliver messages.”