IPA Fast Strategy - bloody hell, we won!

What a  result for the team that Guy Murphy called the "digital misfits".

It was a good description of a rag-tag team and I mean that in a good way. I deliberately choose people who don't fit neatly, people who don't really have clear titles and have many different work "hats".

Sometimes I am Head of Digital Strategy, sometimes Head of Comms Planning, sometimes Planning Director, sometimes Planner. To be honest I am not really that bothered what I called so long as I can work on interesting briefs and do smart creative stuff.

I felt the same thing from the other team members I picked -  Yusuf , Adil, Martin and Martin. All of them are flexible, creative thinkers who just enjoy solving problems.

We were pitching against a Dave Trott team which included George Michaelides (smart "names over the door" thinking!) and other Media/Comms Planning types and Kate Stanners and a team made up entirely of Creatives.

The brief was a live one from Ian Armstrong,  the main Honda client.

HONDA ARE LAUNCHING A NEW HYBRID IN 2009  - IT WILL SELL FOR AROUND £13K, TOYOTA PRIUS RETAILS FOR AROUND £17K. WHAT'S THE LAUNCH STRATEGY?

In the interests of Radical Transparency, this was our chain of though. 

(some of the answers were immersed in the briefing pack, some we used intuition...)

1. How many cars do they need to sell?
10k
2. Is this a little or a lot?
This is a lot - all Hybrid cars sold YTD are aprox 10K, across all car categories
3. Why could this be?
There are issues, skepticism and confusion around the word "Hybrid" - is it really green, is it any good, isn't it a smug middle class type of purchase
4. What's so good about this car?
Hybrids have very low running costs and are better for the environment due to lower immisions.
5. What's the current social and cultural context
Its bloody awful economically and people are thinking less about "eco" and more about "eco-nomics" - their worlds are getting smaller so to speak. Its less about "we" and more about "me"

So, lets dial down the eco bit of this car - and focus more on the economics of the car.

Let's allow Toyota and the Prius to grow the hybrid market because we will get a good share of it due to our highly competitive price point and the good reliability of Hondas generally. 

1. Where do we get share from?
Let's attack the diesel market - its massive (119k c-class sold YTD) and we believe that this audience is a cost-conscious one, so it should be an easy sale. 

2. What is the core thought at the heart of this strategy?

Let's start with the car itself and the technology within -
- Product truth - a hybrid engine has two components, a fuel part and a battery part - one essentially "feeds" the other, so that it works on battery sometimes and fuel at other times. The energy isn't wasted, its transferred.
- Audience truth - People are anxious about money and family fiances, people are concerned with wastage and conspicuous consumption
- Brand truth - Honda is a company that wants society to "want them"

Our Solution - a Social Movement WASTE NOTHING

The car technology wastes nothing, society is moving to a waste nothing phase and Honda has social benefits at the heart of the company.

That's it really.

It was a huge amount of fun.  The feedback about the day in general was really positive.

Worth keeping track of the next Fast Strategy and signing up!

Anways,

This was the deck.

IPA Fast Strategy - Honda

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: honda advertising)

(and hello to Will, Belinda and others...)
ps. There's an interesting Russell Davies POV on the downside of Fast Strategy over at his blog - for the record, I think that our team thought that the exercise of developing a strategy in a few hours was ( at least for us - enjoyable, eye-opening and entertaining), however we did all agree that while we did come to a strategic solution in the allocated time, we had no time to stress-test it, question it, pull it apart and ask any difficult questions, we just had to take a deep breath and go for it. And that probably doesn't give the client always the best solution....

Comments

[sidekick]

It sounds much simpler the way you tell it, then when we were in the room, scrabbling around like mad fools. It was fun to work in it with you.

[neilperkin]

Great stuff, Amelia. Congrats on winning!

[Adrian Ho]

Really nice solution, congratulations.

[Martin Thomas]

As representatives of a new way of working, it was pretty important for us to win the contest. Had we been beaten by the team with the traditional creative agency model (planner, creative & media) or the bunch of creative luminaries, it would probably have been time to pack up and leave the business. Take inspiration digital misfits.

[Yusuf]

Thanks for having me on the team. My head was hurting but it was fun.

[windo]

thanks for sharing. congrats!

[Stephen Davies]

Congratulations!

[Anjali]

Congrats and thanks for sharing. I like the way your team's thought process went!

[Wal]

great stuff, the deck seems complicated without explanation but the idea rocks well from your simple words. congrats!

[Dan]

Congratulations!

Having seen the inside of the Volkswagen version of that brief in real life, the Honda task wasn't an easy one to win. It took a team here a few months to come up with a solution, which returns us to our ongoing ping-pong conversation. Should we be having these sorts of events in the first place?

When we did 'Iron Planner' in the US, it felt like it made more sense because departments are smaller and there are few IPA, APG, or grad training programmes, as you know from working Stateside. I was lucky enough to begin my career in a large department at TBWA, but most agencies in the US have one or two planners of varying experience.

It's a lot better over here; the planners in the UK with three or four years of experience are better prepared than many of the ten year planners over in the States. We have larger departments where knowledge can be transmitted both formally and informally.

The experience at work is rounded out by five years of IPA courses and APG skills courses, which mix didactic and socratic learning. So do we need a Fast Strategy Conference?

I'm still not convinced. My suspicion is that it was entertaining and provided a masterclass for those in the audience who don't work with strategy as much as they would like. You probably could learn to cook from 'Iron Chef' but maybe you shouldn't.

I did get one request for a ticket for the April Fast Strategy event and I denied it, and no one asked this time around, though I think someone paid their own way and went anyway. I just figure that in a big department with lots of training, a variety of planning mentors, and many new business pitches that seeing three rushed examples might be fun but not a good use of £150 per person.

This takes nothing away from your victory. It sounds like you were a bit unsure going into the event, but obviously you ran a tight ship and came up with a compelling strategy. I am curious to see what the other teams came up with.

If we are serious about promoting strategy as an industry, perhaps we should hold a strategy conference where the IPA pays agencies for access to their year-old submissions to a big new business pitch. Seeing what was done by rival agencies would be far more instructive and useful, as it would be work developed over weeks rather than hours. But the myth of proprietary thinking pervades, and I don't think anyone would ever agree to it. Let's see if a brave brand owner might help arrange it; it would benefit clients and agencies alike.

[Amelia]

Thanks Dan - food for thought. So with that as a frame of reference lets stick with food and cooking...

You are right you can't learn HOW to cook from Iron Chef, but what you can get is a bit of inspiration, a "f*ck it, let's give it a go" kind of approach and an insight into how chefs go about creating new dishes.

Now apply that to something like Iron Planner or Fast Strategy and surely that's a good thing? Yes, you shouldn't use something like this to learn your planning fundamentals but it adds a certain something to the mix.

Whereas Iron Planner was all about the competition, Fast Strategy was a morning of talks and advice and case studies as well as the three teams taking part.

(on a side-note I love the idea of agencies sharing pitch presentations from the past, but I doubt that we will see that anytime soon...)

[run your car on water]

congrats this is so cool.