Stick to the plan, no matter what

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: branding ideas in the 1980s have come from them. Led by Habitat, Laura Ashley, The Body shop, Next etc; now increasingly followed by bigger retailers—M&S Foods, for instance, or Sainsbury’s Homebase or the new plans for Safeway. If manufacturers’ brands were to flourish in this context, no amount of tweaking would be enough. Account planners, to be really useful to clients, had to offer something at the strategic end of the scale.

Fifthly, consumers the-mselves, as they moved from the new individualism of the 1970s to the Designer Everything of the 1980s. What people came to want, in almost everything, was both variety and style. A company like Hi-Tec meets this by making some 200 different styles of shoe—a manufacturing triumph but a bit of a problem for marketing and distribution. A clear need for the account planner’s classic role of strategic simplifier.

But if external changes were drawing planners to the left, two changes within the advertising business were pulling them to the right, to a much more exclusive concern with advertisements. The first was the recognition that, today, consumers know about and willingly participate in the game of marketing. They had come to value a company for the style of its advertising, not just the contents or the arguments. The Benson & Hedges Gold ads became collectors’ pieces not just for advertising people but for everyone. Account planners became much more involved in the fine tuning of creative execution. They ran group discussions, listened to the nuances of consumers’ responses to rough ads and then justified what was often “difficult” advertising to the clients.