A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King

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Who Do You Think You Are?

By Malcolm White, Planning Partner, krow

 

 

 

 

 

Of the articles presented in this wonderful book, 91% were written by Stephen King. The remaining 9% (or two articles) were written by the late John Treasure, formerly of JWT, and the late Stanley Pollitt, formerly of Boase Massimi Pollitt. Both these articles are collected here along with Stephen King’s account of the birth of account planning.

These three articles are quite different from the others in this collection. They are not directly concerned with marketing, brands or budget setting, nor with technical subjects like pre-testing. Nor are they theoretical or obviously polemical.

Instead, all the articles are concerned with events that happened almost 40 years ago. They are the story of something extraordinary that happened when three people who are sadly no longer with us, and a host of other individuals who are much less well known than these three authors, started thinking along similar lines. The extraordinary something was the development and introduction of account planning in agencies.

The story each article tells from slightly different perspectives is played out in a world that seems very different from our own: it is a world that is sketched out in the articles. Advertising agencies have marketing departments that plan new product development, that analyse the sales data for clients and present the results to them at their board meetings. Account men are called “representatives” (or at least ...