This
week’s been all about refining my ideas. To help with this I’ve been looking at
Planning Frameworks as a tool for clarifying what I want to say. I wouldn’t
claim W+K is necessarily a framework kind of place. There are no set formulas
here. Every Planner has their own style and no one is telling me to do it this
way or that. But as a starting structure to shape and tease my ideas learning a
bit about this has been really useful. 

It’s
most useful when you have a huge mass of information. Following my brand
architecture project I had a deck full of ideas and examples. My slides were
organised, but it still felt a little bit all over the place. It was then that
I was given the metaphor of a funnel. I started sketching this as one of our
Planners described it to me. I now have a slightly odd looking drawing in my
notebook that could resemble a GCSE biology diagram of a bladder. This is
actually the funnel.

[the sketch]

At
the top of the funnel is the overarching idea, the first thing you think of
when a particular brand is mentioned. Different levels of the funnel invited me
to question: How does this idea make brand look? What’s the tone? As my project
was about brand architecture the brands going into my funnel were the ‘branded
house’ kind of companies, the ones with lots of subsidiaries. This meant that
there were small puddles at the bottom of my funnel representing each offshoot
of the master brand. How were they different? How were they linked?

It
definitely helped get each brand down onto one slide, with a clear and focused
view on what they were doing. 

[Thoughts
from Planning newbie Alexa]