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Nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen is ‘the most feared chess brain on
Earth.’ 1 He drew with Garry Kasparov aged 13. He was the youngest
ever competitor at the World Championships. He’s a prodigy at a
pastime in which the object is ‘to crush the other man’s mind.’2 This
is how he describes his technique: ‘when I touch a piece to move it,
I have already decided, subconsciously or consciously, where to move
it. I feel that a lot of the positions I take are actually subconscious.
I’m thinking about a move, and then suddenly I make it without
realizing what my thought process was.’ So the leading practitioner
of the most rational game in the world does not always use conscious
reason to make his decisions.

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This is consistent with what we’ve come to discover
about human decision-making in recent years. It’s
become clear that it relies on emotions, at least in
the sense that people, while not necessarily weeping
at the time, are using subconscious and unconscious
processes to make apparently rational decisions.
It’s also clear that the mind works more efficiently
this way, that this applies to purchasing decisions
too, and that, at the top level of generalisation,
‘emotional’ campaigns tend to work better than
‘rational’ ones. Thank you, Messrs. Heath, Feldwick,
Gladwell, Binet, Field, Phineas P. Gage, and many
others. You’ve made the point wonderfully.
In the planning world, this is now pretty much
taken for granted. At the recent APG debate
on ‘head, heart, or herd’ there certainly wasn’t
overwhelming support for ‘head’ as a means
of understanding consumers. Everyone had a
good laugh at persuasion scores and qualitative
researchers asking people direct questions.
Although in defence of researchers, even half-
decent ones have long realized the limitations of
direct questioning and used conversation, projective
techniques and good interpretation to fight them.
So, having received overwhelming evidence of
the power of emotion (or at least its slightly less
hysterical-sounding cousins, instinct and intuition)
in the decision process, surely it would be reasonable
to assume that we should be using it a great deal
when we develop campaigns for our clients?
Not just in the creative process but throughout
our work? Don’t we now have plenty of evidence
that we’re likely to work better that way?
The early planners certainly seemed to think so.
The other day I happened to re-read the original
guide to planning advertising written at JWT in
1974. It deals with this issue head-on:
‘What this means is that setting a strategy is not
a matter simply of straightforward and logical
deduction: it is also a matter of interpretation,
judgment, imagination, and innovation. Working
out the strategy is just as much a creative act as
making the advertisements.’ (JWT underlining,
not mine.)
Jon Steel also recognized the role of intuition when
he wrote about the Art of Account Planning, not
the Science of Account Planning. Smart planners
have recognized it all along, and more and more
empirical evidence has emerged to support them.
Paradoxically, the trend is in precisely the opposite
direction. Claire Beale wrote in ‘Campaign’ recently
about how ‘the pendulum has swung too far away
from the magic and too much towards cost and
commoditised efficiency.’ I don’t think too many
people would disagree with her. The trend is not
towards, but away from intuitive decision-making.
We’re moving from an art business to a science
business. We’re not just post-rationalising, we’re
pre-rationalising. We’re drawn ever deeper into
the language and practice of rationality, despite
some convincing evidence that we’d be serving
our clients better if we did precisely the opposite.
It doesn’t just make the business less fun, it
potentially makes our product less valuable.
It’s not hard to see what might be causing this.
First, there’s pressure on our business, helped
perhaps by a largely outdated perception that we’re
an industry of lunch-crazed hedonists. We have
competition from consultancies and our clients
have acquired many of our ‘traditional’ skills,
as Jim Carroll pointed out recently in another
Planning Instant. We’re concerned about getting
pushed down the food chain, and one response
to this has been to try and appear super-smart,
super-business-like, super-analytical, not just an
emotional band of flibbertigibbets.
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Secondly, there’s simply more stuff to get your
head around as a planner. There’s more data
around begging to be analysed and algorithmed,
more science on human behaviour and how the
brain works, more ways to connect with people,
more clever stuff out there we know we ought to
read, more cultures and sub-cultures we need to
understand, more change, more complexity, more
fiddly bits. We’re expected to embrace all previous
learning about business/brands/communications,
while our job descriptions never actually drop
anything, they just grow new limbs. And we’re
doing all this in less time than ever before. If it
wasn’t so fascinating, it wouldn’t half make our
brains hurt.
Of course, no one should be asked to feel sorry
for our brains: they’ll cope. But what matters is
whether more thinking is producing results.
Is our end product getting better? Are we rising
up the food chain? Well, no doubt there are some
arguments that both these things are happening.
But somehow, neither our industry nor its products
have quite the same prestige and cultural impact
that they once did, when the smartest solutions
to almost any problem were assumed to emanate
from Saatchi & Saatchi, and when (as Paul
Feldwick has pointed out using TGI) the public
had a much higher opinion of advertising, at least
in comparison with programming (and if you
think that’s because programming is much better
nowadays, then I invite you to watch Come Dine
With Me.) Is it possible that we’re thinking harder
and getting worse?
This is not an argument for looking backward,
being dumb, or not getting to know the people
we’re talking to. Planners are rightly expected to
bring intellectual rigour, and if we don’t get our
collective brain around change, we’re dead in the
water. Those 1974 planners who were arguing
for the role of intuition were famous for their
intellectual gifts, and they were doing a great deal
of learning about people, brands, and business.
They were advocating informed intuition, not
ignorant intuition. And of course we do need an
orderly, scientific approach to make sense of huge
volumes of data. But still, when everything around
us is making our brains work harder than ever,
Footnotes
1. ‘The Times’ magazine.
2. Bobby Fischer.
maybe it’s harder to create the necessary space
for our (very valuable) guts. So what can we do
about it? Well, that’s probably a subject for a
Planning Hand-Ground and Freshly Roasted
rather than a Planning Instant, but it has some
implications for how we work and how we convey
our value to clients. In my own limited experience,
the best intuition often emerges when groups of
informed people have the time and space to get
together, thrash out the problem, go away and
think about it some more, and repeat… before the
process of rational validation, or even of writing
a brief begins. That sounds dead simple but my
guess is that it happens less and less as the business
becomes more mechanical and ‘productive.’
Secondly, we need to stand up for ‘soft’ techniques.
Great qualitative research done by great researchers
with time to interpret, not just ‘moderate’, was
instrumental in many of the most effective, best-
loved campaigns in history. We should resist
the glib Freudian assumption that hard data is
always better than soft. There’s a role for both.
Bad qualitative research sucks but great research
can be really helpful and it’s up to us to fight for it.
And finally, we need to tell clients the truth:
that to get the best results they need to pay for
expertise not just professionalism, for intuition
not just knowledge, and for blind alleys, random
conversations and a great deal of sniffing around,
not just squeaky-clean efficiency. Otherwise
they’ll be missing out on the true value of what
we, and maybe even Magnus Carlsen, do best.
John Shaw
Planning and Strategy Partner, Rapier