Walks of Life

People are a curious breed. As a Planner and because I'm a person too, I'm very interested in people.

I think sometimes, Planning can be as simple as two steps:

1) Trying to understand (relevant) people;
2) So you can (hopefully) manipulate them into doing what you would like.

I actually think it's (more or less) as simple as that. (We can read as many blogs as we like, go to as many IPA meetings as we like, read obscure out of print books from Charing Cross Rd, so we can use words and cite sociologists no one has ever heard of... but we'll probably still be trying to achieve 1 + 2 above.)

I love part one, but am less enamored by part two if I don't fully buy into the reason (or brand) behind the manipulation. (Oh, and by the way, I don't mean manipulation in a negative sense.)

Part one really fascinates me. We can use lots of tools to learn about the people we want to learn about. There are qualitative and quantitative things we can use. (I bet you're loving this lesson of 'Planning for Idiots'...) Me? Well, I like to use the relevant tools. And the relevancy is determined by lots of factors that I won't go into now - that's a post for later.

I've mentioned previously that I'm passionate about trying to understand people from outside the industry. Of getting their opinions on stuff. Of hearing things from their perspective. Of finding out their opinions on advertising and marketing.

So as a new part of the blog I'm starting a new section where I'm basically going to formalise some chats I have with friends, family and acquantainces that I think have some cool stuff to say. There are going to be two parts to the chats - the first part will be them talking about what they do for a living, how they do it, why they do it and all that jazz. The second part will be them talking about advertising and marketing. What are their opinions on the stuff we do for a living? Do they even notice it? What grabbed their attention recently? etc (Of course the precise questions will change from person to person.)

So far I'm making contact with a: Professional comedian, Forensic psychologist, Betting shop manager, Builder, Member of a semi-professional band, and others. (It's funny listing friends and family like that.)

If you have any interesting people you'd like to put forward, or if you'd like to suggest questions for these people then email me or message me on twitter. Hopefully we'll end up with some really interesting stuff.

Comments

[jam]

o_0

good idea.

[charlie gower]

nice idea there Mr Gormandizer Man