Something about what comes next

I have been thinking a lot about things that could be done and needed to be done and about what 2008 should be like. Everyone makes plans and I think I am particularly blessed because I am in a moment in my life where most of the coordinates are there for me to be able to do the best I can do, make the best I can make and hopefully make a difference.

One thing I know I want to do is take the advice of a person that is special to me and look closely at what exactly it is that we (including me) are doing to comms in Romania. I have changed the title of this blog to reflect that - I think that doing comms has been wedged into these little confined places where we are either planners for adverts, brand managers or marketing managers and somehow none of these have anything in common or any substance for that matter. You cannot do planning REALLY when your market is still groping about such basic stuff as positioning, differentiation, brand touchpoints, research etc.

I needed to include the idea of design after talking to Andrea (thanks!) because together we realized design is something that works just like, or better than strategy. Designing means making something be best suited for its purpose. Ultimately that's what we look for when we do "strategy" but somehow there are some many platforms for that word that it has lost meaning. Plus, when did someone really take you seriously when you answered "strategy" to the question "what do you do for a living?". So design seems to be describing perfectly what comms are lacking in Romania but without the pompous feel of "strategy".

Reading A Master Class in Brand Planning I realized why I had always felt that what planners were doing was a pale image to what we should have been doing: planning was originally marketing comms and that entitled planners to call themselves R&D people, researchers, marketers, advertisers, anything really because they were doing all that. Eventually some people became so specialized that their trade included only ad planning, or only brand planning etc etc

In Romania, we have, and I have said this before, artificially split the trades already even though we literally do not have the knowledge to do so. We have planners, and brand managers and marketing managers but none of them are academically or on site trained to be specifically that. If you get lucky you have some marketing comms background.

So, what I think I might be doing for a while is trying to get more stuff in here about marketing comms in Romania and how maybe to do them properly.

This means I will we touching on planning but also on anything else related to comms. And to be clear about this, comms to me is marketing communication which includes marketing, advertising, internal comm, brand comm, brand engagement, online (which needs to be included as a separate entity), innovation and involvement.

I think this is a big piece to chew on, but frankly I find it hard to go on about the virtues of planning alone when, truly, planning is in its infancy and we have some more basic stuff to look at before we go into the finer details of advert strategy.

I hope this works out for me, of course it does not mean I will refrain from posting my own brand of silliness :-)

... a new year begins!