Trust me, I’m a Planner

I’ve been thinking a lot about Trust recently.

In an planning/agency context, there’s a lot of Trust needed, between Planners and their Account Directors (please involve me but don’t try and micro manage my relationship with your client) and between Planners and their key client contacts (I really do have the best interests of your brand and business at heart).

And that’s important, because what we’re trying to achieve as an agency/client team, is to get consumers/retailers/employees/stakeholders to trust (and therefore engage with) their brands.

I’ve been revisiting Jeremy Bullmore’s great 1972 speech ‘the consumer has a mind as well as a stomach’, where he talks about brands needing to demonstrate what they are saying – in his example, telling a funny joke rather than simply saying “I am funny” and expecting consumers to believe it.  Which (I think) all comes down to having to earn trust.

Which seems to bring me back to a thought that as Planners we have to demonstrate our trust-worthiness (both agency and client wise) in order to be given the free rein we need to do our best work.  Which is where carefully selected dropped-into-conversation/ credentials APG and IPA Awards mentions and case studies came in.

But I’m wondering if in just a few months there will be such a lot of Planning ‘thinking’ out there on the internet that it will only take a quick google for a client or colleague to establish whether a Planner is ‘trustworthy’, in the same way that you can currently google brands.  Add in a quick search of  (the suddenly ridiculously expensive) WARC and brandrepublic and we’ve got nowhere to hide…