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

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Four of the Wisest Principles You Will Ever Read

By Simon Clemmow, Partner, Clemmow, Hornby, Inge Ltd

 

 

 

 

 

The scope of this article is astonishing. In just six pages of Admap, it made an important distinction between advertisements and advertising; it dealt with response rather than stimulus in considering how advertising works; it created a simple and practical framework for identifying and defining the role for advertising; and it showed how advertising research could be better used.

If you take “advertising” in 1975 to mean “marketing communications” today, you have four pieces of enduring wisdom that couldn’t be more relevant to planning in our current media and business environment. Let’s take each piece of wisdom in turn. Throughout, I use the term “advertising” in the spirit of the context in which Stephen King was writing more than 30 years ago. Like him, I mean “marketing communications”.

 

 

Four Pieces of Wisdom

1. Advertising vs Advertisements

The distinction between advertisements and advertising is the important difference between content and channel. Advertising is an available channel of communication, which allows people to make contact with one or more other people for an almost infinite number of different reasons. Advertisements are the messages that advertising carries in an attempt to achieve those reasons.

A good analogy is the telephone. Like the telephone system, advertising, as such, can do absolutely nothing. It’s simply there, waiting to be used. Like ...