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I recently spoke with Nick Taylor, Strategic Planning Director at FPP, about the philosophy behind his work. We covered things like the delight of finding insights, how to let go, balancing scepticism and faith, and why insatiability makes you notice small moments. You should follow him on Twitter.

How did you get to where you are today?
One value: curiosity. Asking why things are the way they are, why they can’t be better, and working out the problems that sit between those two points. It’s a mix of wanting to know why people do what they do, exploring and empathising within those situations, and kind of just being a bit nosey.

I currently work in a shopper marketing agency, but originally I studied design technology for this reason. I wanted to know what kinds of problems existed with products, and how we can make better ones. That had a mixture of design, engineering and human factors. So that’s always driven me in what I do for work, and how I can find people who are aligned to a similar way of thinking and want to work together to solve those type of problems.

Then you have the reward side of things. At my current agency, the reward is that self-fulfilling moment of nailing down an insight. I think there are two types of insights. You have “end of the nose” insights, which are the obvious things people hadn’t noticed before. But equally, you have more “behavioural” insights, so for example the notion that the strength of somebody’s tea is more closely linked to how long their toast takes to ‘cook’, than almost anything else (credit to Siamack Salari for that one). So the end of the nose stuff is something you recognise, while the behavioural stuff is more about exploring the reasons behind seemingly abstract behaviour.

There’s a genuine delight in finding those things and seeing how people react to them. There’s equally delight in that “quiet hero moment”, which is when you communicate this to clients and creatives, and you can just see the fire coming up in them and they go and do something about it. I find that quite rewarding.

What does the word “philosophy” mean to you?
It’s an unshakeable belief system that goes across the things people choose to do. For me, it’s just a set of things that define the way I approach a task, and point towards a value I’d like to get out of that. In terms of how I use that philosophy at work, it’s the way I go about doing things to reach those moments of delight.

Which recent beliefs of habits that most improved your life?
There are a couple. The first one is a whole belief about letting go, and to a certain extent letting in. People who are close to me have always labelled me with an OCD tag, by which they are referring to how I have a very specific way I like to do things, whether that’s organising shelves, organising projects or seeing the shape of a delivery come together. That’s probably led me to not letting people in enough, because you feel very strongly about how something should be done, based on how you’ve seen it succeed before.

But my starting point is now more about letting go and letting people in. Letting them prove their value, instead of just assuming value is only ever measured the way I could have seen it. I mentioned this in an exchange with Julian Cole a few months ago, and it’s something that changes as you progress from ‘doing strategy’ to ‘leading strategy’. Understanding where to let go and let in, and where to take control and provide direction. It’s always a challenge, but I see myself now more on the looser end.

The other one is something I’ve always done but now I get why I did it, which is the link between body and mind. I’ve always been a very active person, but only in recent years I realised how being active is a very important part of how I live and why I do what I do. Running for example is a free mind space, because you’re so busy trying to focus on breathing, distance or pace, so you shift your mind from the deliberate task of thinking to just focus on the task at hand. That gives you moments of clarity.

How do you manage faith and scepticism in your work?
As critical thinkers and contrarians, we always need to start from the place of “does it have to be that”, “why is it like that”, “what could it be”. These are questions anybody in our industry should have in their head, whether you’re a planner, creative, client, or in client services. Scepticism is a healthy quality of people in our industry, because it helps you fuel new thoughts and new directions. And then faith is there to suggest how experience tells me this problem was best solved before, and how would I as a human being would react to ‘this’ if it was put in front of me.

Another aspect of faith is that, as you move through different parts of the industry, you start to realise what credible voices look and sound like. Anyone can have a sceptical or contrarian view on something, but you need to understand what credibility looks and feels like so you know when people are making noise for the sake of making noise, as opposed to when it’s the right thing to do.

I see scepticism as a valuable starting point, then using your collated experience and human instinct to give you faith in the right choice to make. And we need to constantly reassess the relationship between the two. It’s a really lazy quality to assume your faith can go from what worked last time. What worked last time should be the starting point of scepticism, because it might not be right in this new context.

What’s one thing you recently changed your mind on?
We take for granted that everybody in the client/agency relationship has the right motivations and capabilities to do the work that’s most effective. I’ve seen behaviours that are self-interested and never in the interest of the consumer, and that has changed my mind about what our role as an agency is.

This is true of shopper marketing and probably other types of marketing as well, but as shopper marketers we are measured on one basic metric above most other things: how much does it sell. ATL agencies often talk about reputation, how people are thinking about us, and how much they love us. But honestly, you can have all the brand love in the world, but if people aren’t buying you then what’s the point? We’re building a brand to sell a product, not a new ideology. We always need to go back to effective measures of success: positively changing someone’s fundamental buying beliefs and behaviours to create a commercial advantage for our clients.

Of course some brands, say a social or lifestyle brand, need to build measures of equity that can have a significant effect on purchase intent, sometimes without even touching shopper activity. Those brands do exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Unfortunately there are very few product choices in store where brand love can help you achieve that on its own. We need a more considered, rounded, and realistic point of view.

What’s your biggest fear? And biggest hope?
We’ve been using a flavour of behavioural economics in our work for the last 15 years or more: shoppers’ psychology at the point they either buy or don’t buy is rooted in predominantly non-rational decision-making. My hope is that we can create a focus on the true fundamentals of decision-making and purchase behaviour for anyone working in marketing. However, my big fear is that it will become the next ‘big thing’ to be heralded by the great and the good as well as the bad and the ugly, becoming commoditised and harder to know when the sensible things are really being said.

I recently presented something about the difference between sympathy and empathy inside the agency, because empathy is the greatest quality that I believe a planner or strategically-led person can have. The ability to think like a 14-year-old teenage girl who’s struggling with her first period, as opposed to a 37-year-old guy, is a great quality. But empathy isn’t the job of one person in the agency. We all have a role to play about how it works in everyday environments, and the same thing goes for behaviour. If you just have one person who focuses on that and therefore nobody else thinks about it, it’s a dangerous thing. But my hope is that more people can develop and demonstrate empathy: making better connections between ourselves, our work, and the people whose lives it can positively impact.

How are you mad?
I feel like I’m on this insatiable pursuit. Constantly curious, looking for insight and inspiration, quite literally all of the time. But I don’t think it’s mad, it’s just an important aspect of leading within this part of an organisation within our industry. The need to constantly be unsettled, not being able to think the job is done, always thinking of something you can do better. That rabbit hole of curiosity.

Once you start working in shopper marketing, you probably never enter a store in the same way. Think of a pineapple that is somehow in the middle of the Coke cans. This doesn’t happen for most people, but if you work within shopper, then this pineapple starts a dizzying train of thought and you get lost in the maze of “why the fuck is there a pineapple among the Cokes?”. Does this mean somebody was carrying a basket with a pineapple and wanted to buy Coke cans, but didn’t have space, so decided to leave the pineapple behind? Or is it something entirely different? Then the same thing happens when you see a pack of M&Ms in the Pringles section. Or a half-eaten swiss roll in the middle of a sweet shop. As someone involved in this industry you start thinking about what it means, and what you’d do to solve it.

This consuming madness of insatiability, of getting lost in small but inwardly-fascinating moments, seems bonkers to everybody else. When my wife puts something in the trolley and I ask why she did that, she looks at me like I’m an idiot. But there’s a delight in the way that insatiability makes you curious about those seemingly small moments and decisions that other people would take for granted. [tweet this]






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